“There are nice hospitals in many of our shipyards where I am sure a doctor of your skills would be welcome. What can I do to help?”
“First, and we haven’t told anyone yet, but Ambrosia and I would like to be married. We would like you to attend.”
The room exploded in joyous pandemonium. When the noise finally calmed down, Warren said, “That was easy. What’s the second?”
“Give us permission to book passage on one of your freighters headed for Eretz,” Moses said.
“Consider it done! A toast to the happy couple!” Warren exclaimed.
When the room had quieted down Sylvia stood for attention. “Since Moses does not want to go to the Academy, do you think I could go in his place?”
Alina looked at her daughter in surprise. “I thought you didn’t want to go to the Academy!”
“I didn’t until Stonebridge. Now I do. I think Saul, Fiona, Rebecca, and me make a great team. I would like to go with them.”
Saul raised his hand in the air and shouted, “Woo Hoo! Score!”
Fiona raised her hand and knuckle bumped with Sylvia.
Warren grinned, “Well, since you are the daughter of an Academy graduate it should be simple. Consider it done.”
Fiona stood and said, “While we making announcements,” she pulled Saul to his feet, “we would also like to be married before we go to the Academy.”
Fiona’s announcement was met with much less surprise than Moses’ because Saul and Fiona had been a forgone conclusion since they left Eretz.
Saul picked up where Fiona left off. “Because of the difference in our religions, we have decided on a civil ceremony. We would like to be married by a ship’s captain. A ship’s captain can perform a wedding, and Grandpa Greg is a ship’s captain, and we would like him to perform the wedding here in this galley.”
“Technically the ship has to be in transit.” David Shapiro, the only member of Rachel’s original “battle group” to not go to Stonebridge and their legal expert, corrected. “And there is some question as to whether Greg or Rachel is actually the captain in legal terms, but frankly as long as a competent authorized local person signs the paperwork, little else matters. In fact, under the Jewish tradition, there need only be the person performing the ceremony, the couple and two witnesses. I think we can find a way to make this work.”
Warren shook his head and said, “Lawyers!”
The double wedding proceeded as planned. The two ceremonies were short, and the party was long. It is amazing how rowdy a party can get even if there is no alcohol involved.
After the party, Saul and Fiona retired to their quarters. “So how do you feel, Mrs. Cohen?” Saul asked as he wrapped his arms around her.
“Like the second happiest woman in the world,” Fiona replied.
“Only the second? Who’s happier?”
“Your mother, that she lived to see the day.”
Moses and Ambrosia left two days later on a convoy that would make several stops before it reached Eretz. Sabrina and her escort ship were assigned to the convoy. Sabrina commented that it would feel awkward traveling without Fiona, but she picked up the widow and infant daughter of a shipyard worker who had been killed in an accident to travel with her.
Three days after that, Elizabeth left with Rachel’s entire original battle group and a full compliment of military and medical personnel as well as 6,000 colonists. The destination was the system where so many ships had gone missing and Warren hoped he might find the first contact with an alien race of space travelers. A few of the unmanned probes had gotten through and reported that a habitable planet did exist, and there was an energy source on the surface that indicated that the planet might currently be inhabited. Data was sketchy at best, but what little there was looked good.
Greg, Avi, Saul and Fiona watched the task force depart. Elizabeth led the formation with her support ships behind her. Greg commented how when he first saw Peter that he was the biggest ship he had ever seen. Now, he was dwarfed by each of Elizabeth’s massive passenger cargo sections.
Once the ships had passed out of sight, Saul asked, “Do you think we’ll ever see them again?”
Greg sighed. “I ask that question every time a ship leaves port. There is no way to know.”
Fiona looked her in-laws and asked, “What are you doing from here?”
“We’re going to visit some old friends, and I think we may retire,” Avi said.
“Where would you retire to?”
“We were thinking of going back to Homestead and rebuilding the house where the girls grew up. It was nice there,” Avi said.
Saul, Fiona, Rebecca and Sylvia met their earth bound freighter three days later. Greg and Avi saw them off as they headed for Earth, the Academy and another great adventure.
Of the half dozen freighters in the convoy, Warren had insisted that they travel on one particular freighter piloted by an old friend with whom he had traveled many times. The captain of the freighter was a portly old man who, with his wife, had piloted freighters for half a century. Their children were grown and gone. They welcomed the four young travelers with open arms. Captain John McGee was a jovial man with a definite preference for off color humor and bad puns. His wife, Catherine, moaned and groaned at his humor, but she loved him so much that none of it mattered. She could be as ribald as he was and loved the sensual nature of their relationship. Captain McGee had few rules on his ship and specifically ignored some company policies. The young travelers guessed correctly that this attitude toward the rules was part of why Warren insisted they be assigned to this ship. Instead of twenty-four hour shifts, the ship ran a sixteen hour day, and everyone slept eight. As McGee put it, the ship was smarter than all of them put together and did not need them to tell it if it had a problem. If it did, it was perfectly capable of waking them.
Captain McGee also ignored the rule on alcohol on the ship. On several occasions he got his young passengers roaring, falling down, sick in the morning, drunk. He claimed it was an experience that they needed to have before the got to the Academy where a wide variety of intoxicants were more readily available than anyone wanted to admit. Many of his crew had been with him for a very long time. This was his third ship. Each time he had been sent back to the shipyard to prototype a new model, and he got to keep the first one off the production line. He had modifications to this one made while it was still in the yard. Normally the captain’s quarters are immediately behind the bridge. He moved the galley behind the bridge and took out the wall between them. The kitchen was beyond the galley, and his quarters were next to the kitchen. The crew and passenger quarters were beyond that. He claimed it was because he and his wife liked to raid the ice cream locker in the middle of the night “barefoot” and they would rather not frighten anyone who might see them. Having the galley next to the bridge made his insistence that everyone eat together much easier to accomplish.
The ship made two stops on its way to earth. Saul, Fiona, Rebecca and Sylvia took advantage of the stops and shopped for gifts for the McGee’s and the crew. None of the gifts were expensive, but it made the stop more fun, and the McGee’s appreciated the thought.
The most important thing the McGee’s taught the newlyweds in their earthy off-color way, was something they could not learn from their parents. They could not have learned it from Fiona’s single parent mom or from Saul’s “tiger by the tail” parents. They learned to love each other. They learned the difference between having sex and making love.
COLONY SERVICE - CHAPTER ONE
RACHEL SAT IN THE SEAT she had occupied at the start of her career and felt at home. Of course, the seat itself and the console in front of it had been replaced because the originals had been destroyed, but that did not matter to her. It was her ship, and she was home. Her eyes swept across the bridge. Every seat was occupied. Every staff position had been filled. The Staff Allocation Department at Stellar Interstellar had worked overtime to build her crew. Normally she liked to pick her own cre
w, but this time she was just as happy that they did it.
Warren had instructed his freighter pilots that anyone from Eretz who wished to join the expedition was to be transported to headquarters at no charge. Rachel was pleased with how many of her former students had made the trip. All of her pilots, fire control officers and munitions specialists came from Eretz. Isaac had no complaints on that score either. With the exception of Dr. Terrell who had been on the retrofit project from the beginning, all of his senior medical staff and many of his nurses had come from Eretz. The engineers, maintenance and all the support personnel including the Marines came from Stellar Interstellar’s ranks, some of whom were brought from considerable distance to be part of this effort.
What pleased Rachel the most was the number of her original “battle group” who had decided to forgo a peaceful retirement in favor of the unknown challenges that lay ahead of them. Her husband, Isaac, was Chief Medical Officer. His brother, Joshua, was Chief of Medical Engineering. This team approach to medicine was what they had trained for, and they were thrilled to be back at it. Wendy had moved up from fighter ops to Executive Officer. Rachel had learned that lesson the hard way. High school and Academy buddy, Reuben Abrams was Chief Engineer. His brother Rashi was back where he was at home as Chief of Munitions. Reuben’s wife Suwanee had earned her degree in emergency medicine and was responsible for the first responders and medical transport support staffs. Faye Anne Sherman was back at Intelligence, and David Shapiro was her legal officer with his wife Natasha as his assistant.
There had been some changes. Sabrina Mahoney was gone. Alina Darwin had moved up from being a combat pilot to the Chief of Flight Operations. Rashi’s wife Esther was back as the pilot of one of the med ships with a copilot straight out of Eretz’s pilot training program. Mimi and J T were on Peter’s bridge. On their previous missions, Mimi and J T had shuttled back and forth with Peter ferrying supplies and personnel in support of the missions. Now that they had a full crew, they would also fly med ships and the container tug with the kids rotating through the co-pilot positions. Ellie Mae and Elvira ran the food service and housekeeping crews efficiently and gracefully.
Moses and Ambrosia were headed back to Eretz. Saul, Fiona, Rebecca and Sylvia were headed to the Academy, but the rest of the kids were here busily assisting in the hospital as needed. Somehow 6,000 people with time on their hands needed a lot of medical attention.
Rachel may have been at home, but she did not relax. She still hurt from the beating she had taken. Her workouts with Madison were agonizing. Some of her injuries might never heal. More than that, she was concerned about what they did not know about their destination. Somehow, though, having no information seemed better than having bad information. She and Faye Anne had discussed this at length. Faye Anne was uncomfortable with how little they knew about this place they were taking 6,000 potential colonists. Only the knowledge that beyond this system was another recently discovered system that had an only slightly less comfortable planet that they could go to if this did not work out relieved her anxiety.
In the three weeks they were in transit, Rachel visited the schools and common areas in the passenger sections. She encouraged the colonists to maintain their training schedules and stay physically as well as mentally fit. She was open with them about how much they knew and how much the did not know about their destination. Most of all she explained to them the plan that they would use to approach the planet.
They would drop from hyperspace one light day out of the system. They would send in four unmanned probes. They would have to wait two days for the reports the probes returned to arrive. Based on what the probes sent back, they would probably send the two P I ships to investigate whatever the probes found that was of interest. If the probes did not return or were fired on, they would send in the two escort ships along with the P I ships and prepare for battle.
If there was no resistance or after any resistance had been eliminated, they would air drop the Marines and combat engineers along with the necessary equipment to the surface to build a runway. Once the runway was built, they would ferry down construction personnel. As habitable structures were assembled, more people would be ferried down to fill them until all the colonists had been ferried to the surface. The two escort ships would return to regular duty once the planet was secured. Peter would return to headquarters with a shopping list of things that had been forgotten. Rachel had no illusions that everything they would need was in a hold somewhere. Peter would shuttle back and forth, and Elizabeth would stay until one full year had passed. Then, if the colony was able to support itself, Elizabeth and the rest of the fleet would depart leaving behind a ring of satellites and small force of defensive space craft.
Of course, although Rachel never said this, she knew that no plan survives contact with the enemy, and whatever happened, it would not be exactly according to plan.
Expecting the worst and hoping for the best, the task force dropped out of hyperspace. The four probes departed straight and true for their destination. The wait for the return signals was agonizing. While they waiting hanging in space, many of the colonists had their first extended experience with weightlessness. Some of them handled it better than others. The hospital staff dispensed a lot of anti nausea medications during those two days. As would be expected, most of the school aged children adapted quicker than their parents. They discovered that games that were fun normally were more fun weightless and unfortunately a lot more dangerous. Many of the children found themselves in the emergency room with bruises and minor fractures from their new found forms of play.
When the signals arrived from the probes, the news was not good. The first probe had been surrounded and destroyed. Fortunately it had enough time to identify its attackers before it was destroyed. There were no aliens here. It had been attacked by a variant of the Space Weapons Labs 21. This was very bad news. Space Weapons Labs had manufactured thousands of these little ships with no regard to who bought them. They were cheap and easy to operate. Any reasonably adept ten year old could handle one. This was the ship of choice for defending pirate bases or drug smuggling depots. The problem was that they were not especially reliable and their missiles were not very accurate. The missiles had the tendency to turn back around in flight and attack the ship that fired them. In spite of all their shortcomings, in sufficient quantity, the ships could be difficult to deal with.
The second probe fared only slightly better than the first. It was beset by a couple dozen of these small ships before it was destroyed. The data it transmitted painted a grim picture of what they were up against. The third probe passed through the defense net undetected and reported the presence of a large settlement near the equator. The majority of the planet was under an ice sheet but the equatorial areas appeared to be habitable. It also observed a web of observation and tracking satellites. The fourth probe did not report back.
“We can safely make some assumptions,” Faye Anne said in the conference room after the reports had been assimilated. “They are up to no good. They know someone is here, and they have a general fix on our direction. If they have hyper capable ships, they should be here shortly. If not, we have few days before they arrive.”
“Then we had best be somewhere else,” Rachel said. She called a set of coordinates to the helmsman. “Paul, alert all ships to jump to these coordinates on your mark. Give me a ten count before you jump.”
“Aye, Captain.”
Rachel turned back to the table. “That should buy us a little time. Everyone back to your stations please.”
The coordinates she had given the helmsman put them inside the asteroid belt on the opposite side of the system from the occupied planet. The new position was close enough that she could engage the system defenses but far enough away that she would have warning of their response. If things got really out of hand they could hide in the asteroid belt for a long time without being found. Theoretically, that would give them enough time to send a courier missile and call fo
r help.
Had this system been listed on the Admiralty charts as being inhabited, Rachel would have been required to stand off and request clearance to approach. Since it was not and given that her probes had been destroyed, there was legal justification for moving closer without notification. Rachel moved carefully.
As she suspected might happen, the task force was immediately detected by a tracking satellite. Given the density of the satellites, the fact that any of the probes got through indicated the incompetence of the interceptors. However, an unruly mob of incompetents can still do a lot of damage. According to the list the intelligence folks had given her, all the missing ships were small scouts and pirate vessels. None of these vessels were particularly well armed, and the pilots were often minimally trained. The assignment to scout the extents of the galaxy for habitable planets was often reserved for people who were so anti social or so dangerous to society that the only solution was to send them away, far away. This did not necessarily make them skilled pilots. Rachel scanned the sensor reports for evidence of a large ship. A myriad of small ships would be difficult, but manageable. A large ship might be a different situation.
According to the various conventions regarding space flight within the boundaries of an occupied system, if a ship entering a system does not first identify itself, it is to be challenged on a range of radio frequencies whose assignment dated back to the earliest use of radio for wet navies. Rachel waited for the challenge that never came. In many systems, the ships and the traffic control system traded data without human intervention. Identification and acknowledgment as well as navigational information passed from machine to machine. Clearances were authorized and flight patterns confirmed without the pilots’ involvement. None of those activities was occurring. Whatever was going on down there was not Federation approved.
Faye Anne turned to face Rachel. “Should we send a courier and ask for reinforcements?”
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