“Beginning to feel like my old self. Thank you.” She pointed to a chair. Reuben picked up a stack of print outs from the chair and placed it on the table where it gently floated away.
“What can I do for you?”
“This is the planet’s smaller moon. It is a third the size of Earth’s moon. You know the way Saul brought the P I ships in tail first? Could we do that with Elizabeth on this moon and set her on the ground? Could she sit like she did under construction?”
Reuben grabbed one of the floating pictures, clearly uncomfortable. “These ships aren’t designed for that. Once the tugs lift them off they never touch the surface again. Saul could have gotten them all killed. Had Buddy’s math been off by a tenth of a percent, they would have buried themselves in a deep hole in the ocean.”
“But, they didn’t.”
“No, they didn’t and none of the engineers I talked to feels confident that what Saul did could be done again. Too hard a landing could bend the trusses, and Elizabeth will never move again.”
“Reuben, take as much time as you need. Take your best people, and work this through with Elizabeth. I want to park us on the far side of that little moon. What about Peter?”
“Peter has no structure that will support his weight on the surface. He was built in an orbiting ship yard. Elizabeth has structure that extends far enough aft that we can set her down without crushing her propulsion systems. Peter has no such structure. If we were to set him on the surface we would crush his drives.”
“Well then, Peter will have to hide somewhere until this is over.”
“For what it’s worth, the engineers back at the ship yard felt that the structure in Elizabeth’s aft section would support her weight on Earth’s moon if tugs put her down, but nothing larger, and they cautioned against taking her into an atmosphere or too near the asteroid belt.”
“Thank you, Reuben, please gather your team. You might wish to consult Buddy on what challenges he ran into since he actually made the descent twice, once with passengers and once without.”
“Good point.”
Reuben left organizing his thoughts for the challenge that Rachel had given him.
“Elizabeth, could you ask Mr. Zarnovsky to meet me here?”
“Certainly.”
Boris Zarnovsky was the civilian project manager for the colonists. A veteran of many projects, he hoped to make this one his last and settle where he could live out the rest of his days in peace. Somehow, Rachel doubted that this would be it. Rachel rose when Mr. Zarnovsky entered the office.
“To what do I owe the honor of this summons,” he asked with a twinkle in his eye. He already knew much of what Rachel was about to tell him, except for what her plans were dealing with the situation and his involvement in those plans.
“Boris, sometimes I merely want the pleasure of your company,” Rachel teased.
The old man grinned. “Those days are long gone. What can I do for you, my captain?”
Rachel explained what Faye Anne had told her about the planet’s current inhabitants and what she would like to do about them. She further explained how she wanted some of his ground troops to support her Marines. The Marines had combat armored flight suits that could be worn in the vacuum of space. The ground troops under Boris’ command had combat armor, but it was not space worthy. With careful planning, both forces working together could accomplish the task at hand.
When Rachel had finished, Boris clapped his hands together in glee. “It’s brilliant! Original and diabolical! I love it.”
“I guess that means you think it will work.”
“Oh, there are a dozen ways it could turn into a complete disaster, but that’s what makes it fun! My troops will be ready at the appointed time. Thank you for giving an old man one more chance to run with the big dogs.”
There was a spring in Boris’ step as he left the room.
“Elizabeth, status report please.”
“All systems nominal except for a plumbing issue in module 2 and a domestic disturbance in module 1. No unidentified or unfriendly vessels are within sensor range. Reuben and his staff are huddled in the engineering conference room.”
“Thank you, Elizabeth.”
“Would you like to listen in on the pajama party in module 3?”
Rachel chuckled. “No, thank you, and I will remind you to respect peoples’ privacy.”
“I understand, but they are having so much fun. Weightlessness makes everything sillier.”
“I appreciate the thought. Please inform my entire battle staff, flight crews and primary bridge crew that we will be meeting in the conference in one hour.”
“They won’t all fit in the conference room.”
“Send the bridge crew to their stations. They can participate remotely from there.”
“Tell the medical department heads I will meet with them in the conference room in two hours.”
“If Boris would like his people to meet with me directly, they should be here in three hours. If he is going to handle the briefings on his own, he should let me know.”
“Captain?”
“Yes, Elizabeth?”
“It is a very good plan and could be a lot of fun.”
“Somehow fun and battle plans do not usually go together.”
“Maybe they should.”
Rachel sighed. “I am going to the galley and get dinner. No mischief, you hear?”
“Aye, Captain.”
Faye Anne started the briefing with what she had learned from their captives along with a detailed assessment of their combat capabilities, strengths and weaknesses. Faye Anne had asked Isaac to join the briefing and talk about his observations, some of which were different from Faye Anne’s.
Rachel picked up the briefing when Isaac and Faye Anne finished. “While these guys may not be the sharpest knives in the drawer, it does not mean that we should underestimate them. Just because they are not smart enough to mount a concerted attack does not mean we should kill them outright either. If what we believe to be their current inventory of warships is correct, if they were to coordinate an attack, they could overwhelm us. On the other hand, based on information from their own satellites, I believe they are sticking close to home. We could hyper in the P I’s and the escorts, lob a few missiles around and hyper out. We would repeat that as many times as it took to kill all the ships. That seems wasteful and will litter the navigable areas around the planet with debris that could be hazards for decades. My initial plan was to wrangle the ships away from the home planet and destroy them somewhere where the debris would not be a hazard and then I wondered why we needed to create debris fields at all. We can use the Disruptor missiles to disable the ships and not destroy them. Then we could park them on the moon and retrieve the crews and ships at our leisure.”
“What do you mean by ‘wrangle’? Do you mean like herding cattle?” Aida asked thinking correctly that most of the hard work would fall to her and the other P I crew.
“Exactly, you, Delilah and Buddy with your cohorts in crime, Whitney, Brad and Daisy will jump into the middle and cut them out of the herd like cattle. I’ve seen you fly. I know you can do it. You will pass them to the escort ships who will drive them to us. We’ll disable them with Disruptor missiles from here so we don’t waste yours. The tug will take control and park them next to us in the corral.”
“Won’t we use a lot of Disruptor missiles that way?” Aida asked.
“Not really,” Rashi said, “We can park a half a dozen near the gate to the corral and turn them on or off remotely or if we need to chase one of the cattle they could do that too. Then the disabled ship merely drifts in our direction. The tug snatches it and parks it. How Cool!”
“One more thing,” Rachel added, “combat communications will be in Hebrew. We don’t know if these guys speak Standard, but we can be confident that they don’t know Hebrew.”
One of the reasons Rachel liked the fact that her flight crews had come from Eretz was that Hebrew and
not Standard was their native language. Children on Eretz grew up fluent in both languages. Coded messages passed in Hebrew were just enough more difficult to decipher that the typical interloper quickly gave up.
Rachel briefed the medical staff and then key personnel from the ground forces. The plan appealed to them, but they recognized how different the risks would from a “blow them out of the sky” approach. The colonists especially liked the idea that the ships could later be retrieved, repaired and returned to service. Debris fields are much tougher to reassemble and reuse than ships damaged by Disruptor missiles. Even antique warships are better than no warships.
When Rachel had been notified that all personnel were in place, she quietly said to her bridge crew, “Ladies and Gentlemen, initiate operation ‘Rodeo Roundup’. Let’s keep our wits about us.”
Elizabeth settled gently on to the small moon. The med-evac ships circled around her sitting on their landing gear with their lasers armed and their engines warmed in case they were called to support one of the four, count them four, small warships with which they were attacking this planet. Sensor and tracking satellites were deployed and began sending data. The sensors reported a small fleet of pickets on patrol in their vicinity. There were half a dozen destroyers, two P I ships and a bewildering array of unarmed random scout and lightly armed pirate ships she did not know about in orbit around the planet. Topping off the enemy fleet there were three cruisers in addition to the old battleship.
Had Rachel known the true strength of the planet’s defenses, she probably would not have attempted ‘Rodeo Roundup’ the way she did. The only reason she continued instead of retreating was because of the ineptitude that she had seen in the last encounter. Rachel knew that if she was in command of the fleet she now opposed, a fleet the size of the one she now commanded would never have come this close to the home planet without being challenged and destroyed. In her first battle at Homestead the odds had been far more extreme than this, and her enemies had been much better trained than these people appeared to be. She concluded that the remainder of the defenders were probably as incompetent as the first batch they had encountered.
They deployed the two P I ships and the two convoy escorts. They sat and waited. It was kind of like waiting for the first children on Halloween to make their appearance so the festivities could begin. The first few pickets arrived singly and were quickly dispatched, rounded up and parked on the small moon. Traditionally the picket ship, originally designed by Valiant Industries, upon discovery of a potential problem would stand off out of range of the problem and call for help. If it was in a situation where it would need to engage an enemy, it was to do so in large numbers so it could overwhelm the enemy, capture them and bring them to justice.
The planet’s current inhabitants had by been dubbed the “Vikings” due to their long blond hair and aggressive attitudes. The first wave of Viking picket ships came charging at the collection of ships parked on the moon and passed through the ring of Disruptor missiles. The Disruptor missiles destroyed all their higher order electronics and J. T. parked the ships on the moon using the tug. The Marines attached rescue tubes to the captured ships and stormed inside. They removed the captives via the rescue tubes and handed them over to the ground forces who packaged them and deposited them in quarantined cargo containers.
When the single viking picket ships failed to return to their marshaling areas, other Viking pickets began to arrive in pairs and then trios. The Disruptor missiles efficiently disabled them and the med ships were pressed into service to herd the new arrivals into the “corral”.
The only ships that truly concerned Rachel were the two Viking P I ships and they entered the battle once the last of the pickets had been placed neatly in the corrals. An examination by some of Rashi’s munitions specialists determined that the captured pickets had depleted most of their missiles. This would explain why they had come in using only their lasers hoping to get close enough that they could give their missiles a better chance for success. If the observations of the pickets could be applied to the Viking P I ships then they would also be running low on ordinance and might not be as difficult to deal with as Rachel had feared.
The Viking P I ships were from Saturn Industries’ earliest production run and, unless they had spent the kind of time Buddy and Daisy had in modern shipyards, were likely not to have the variety of weapons systems Buddy and Daisy carried. Buddy and Daisy were old versions of this ship, not quite as old as the two breaking orbit from the planet, but they had been retrofitted with technical advances as they became available. More importantly, Buddy and Daisy were among only ten of these ships originally equipped with the larger reactor capable of the short hyper jump. The two Viking ships had the older smaller reactor. Data from the tracking satellites confirmed that these ships lacked the externally mounted missile racks Buddy and Daisy carried. Analysis of the reactor heat emissions as compared to their acceleration confirmed not only that the reactors were smaller but that they were not properly tuned and were probably near the end of their fuel’s effective life.
What the pilots of these ships lacked in finesse they certainly made up in bravery. Side by side, they drove at the best acceleration they could maintain directly for Buddy and Daisy. Facing the oncoming charge, Buddy and Daisy waited with their heat shields facing the advancing Viking ships. Their human crews chatted calmly in Hebrew while the two ships passed digital observations about the two ships preparing to attack them. The approaching ships opened with their lasers. The very first production run of the P I ship had four weapons pods for the lasers which folded out from the fuselage. Each of these pods carried two lasers which, like the cannon in a twentieth century fighter jet, required that the entire ship be aimed at the target. Buddy and Daisy carried updated pods that each carried eight individually aiming lasers. Even had the approaching ships carried more lasers, Buddy and Daisy had heat shields that were quite capable of absorbing the lasers from these two old ships.
At the exact moment when the ships should have been preparing to fire their first round of missiles, Buddy and Daisy separated and looped around behind their opponents. Recognizing their predicament, the two Viking ships split and followed Buddy and Daisy into their loops.
In what appeared to be a herculean diplomatic effort of planning, the destroyers and cruisers which had sat quiet up to this point suddenly fired their engines and entered the battle. Elizabeth had deciphered enough of the language by referencing her historical linguistic database to be able to translate it to the flight crews. While knowing what they were planning was helpful, the Vikings now had a force in action that was three times the size of Rachel’s combat group. The difference in training and the sophistication of armament should have evened the playing field, but Rachel was not willing to accept any casualties among her forces. The two escort ships spun around to face the destroyers and cruisers moving in their direction. The Viking P I ships drove headlong towards the remainder of their fleet obviously setting themselves as bait to get Rachel’s forces to follow them directly into the line of fire of the remainder of the Viking ships.
Recognizing the trap long before it was ready to spring, the two escort ships, Buddy and Daisy broke off pursuit the instant the Vikings fired their missiles in a single volley. Not all of the ships fired all their tubes, but most did. The missiles passed harmlessly into space and kept going. Someday in the distant future these missiles could be a hazard for someone, but given their trajectory, Rashi estimated that these missiles would probably fall into the system’s primary in a few hundred years.
Seeing how easily their prey slipped from their grasp enraged the Vikings. Elizabeth reported with unrestrained mirth that the infuriated and verbally abusive if militarily impotent Vikings had fired the last of their munitions. All they had left were their lasers. The formation broke apart and each ship individually attempted to attack the intruders. The result was almost comical. The space around the small moon was full of dodging and wheeling spacecraf
t reminiscent of a WWI biplane dog fight. Concerned for the safety of their outnumbered colleagues, the med ships lifted off to lend their lasers to the fray.
PI ships are immune to Disruptor missiles and the remainder of the ships in the mass of swirling warships were designed to absorb significant amounts of laser damage. The med ships were lightly armored and except for their heat shields could not withstand as much laser damage as the others. By the end of the second hour of the confrontation, Rashi had burned out a dozen Disruptor missiles chasing the swirling ships before he was able to disable the first destroyer. J. T. dutifully retrieved it and parked it in the “corral” with the others.
By the end of the third hour, one more destroyer and a cruiser had been disabled by the Disruptor missiles. One of the med ships had been hit by a coordinated laser strike and had crashed on the moon. The two pilots had walked away and were slogging their way back to the ship. The ground forces extracted one of the battery operated all terrain “dune buggies” out of the hold and dispatched a Marine to go fetch the stranded flight crew. The flight crew reported never being so happy as when they saw that ungainly contraption bouncing over the hill to fetch them.
Rachel authorized the use of deadly force in the eighth hour of the fracas when the enemy force had been reduced to the two P I’s, two destroyers and one cruiser.
Twelve hours into the dogfight, all of the Viking ships except the two P I’s had been disabled and parked in the corral. Elizabeth had maintained a running translation of the conversation between the Viking P I pilots so there was nothing they could do that would come as a surprise to the remaining pilots that opposed them. On the Viking’s valiant attempt to catch Buddy in a crossfire, Buddy hyper jumped out of the way and the two Viking P I ships slammed into each other disabling their drives. After a brief moment of shock, a cheer rose up on Elizabeth’s bridge that resonated throughout the ship. The battle was over.
Once again, the superiority of Saturn Industries space craft design was demonstrated in combat. For most other ships, a collision of such force would have destroyed both ships and the reactors would have detonated. The P I was designed by engineering maniacs on a mission to avenge the deaths of family and friends at the hands of pirates. They designed a warship that was tough, flexible and could withstand a tremendous amount of abuse. Immediately following determination of an imminent unavoidable collision, the reactors shut down, cooling quickly. Once the collision occurred, the crew compartment separated from the rest of the ship becoming a large escape module. This module contained enough life support to sustain a two man crew for a month. The steering jets allowed the module to dock with another ship for rescue.
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