Solomon Family Warriors II

by Robert H. Cherny

  The mines on Destiny’s Ridge which had been such a big deal when Rachel had secured the planet for the Federation had played out and the mining company had left. The planet’s remaining inhabitants were limited to two groups of religious fanatics who constantly warred with each other. Even the Swordsmen were not interested in the place. Except as a possible refuge, the planet had little to offer Rachel either.

  Norseland was another story. Since the planet had been originally settled as a base to clone Swordsman soldiers until Rachel had intervened, captured it for the Federation and re-populated it with mostly female Swordsman refugees, the Swordsmen wanted it back. The Swordsmen were not prepared for the ferocity with which the planet’s inhabitants defended their turf. The warriors Rachel and her team had referred to as “Vikings” fought like people possessed. “Viking” men and women had fought side by side to defeat the Swordsmen. They had learned the lessons that Rachel’s team and the colony service specialists had taught them. The Swordsman commanding officer had been the only survivor and he had been sent back to Swordsman headquarters with anti-Swordsman slogans tattooed over his entire body as a warning against further attempts on the planet.

  Isaac poked his head into Rachel’s office and said, “Sweetheart, you need to come to bed.”

  “Isaac, I need to go through the reports. Timothy needs an answer.”

  “It will wait another day.”

  “Elizabeth thinks I may be developing hypoglycemia. What do you think?”

  “I think she’s probably right. She usually is.”

  “I have one more report to read and then I’ll be there.”

  Isaac lightly kissed her and headed off to bed. After all the light years they had traveled together he still loved her as much as he had when they married and had been assigned to the same ship to begin their careers together, her as the captain of a self-defending hospital colony ship and him as its chief of medicine. From her smile he knew she loved him the same. They had been compared to Victoria and Albert except that Isaac had already outlived Albert.

  Rachel returned to the last report she wanted to read. Fatima, a journalist from the Constant News Channel, had accompanied the “Fourth Battle Wing” to survey the planet with the dinosaurs. Her reports from that encounter were sensitive and literate. Fatima had moved on with them from there to the planet with the timber wolves when the dinosaur planet was turned over to the Creighton society for protection. Rachel opted to read Fatima’s entire text rather than the summaries Faye Anne had prepared for her. There had been no further reports from that planet, but Fatima’s reports from the planet with the wolves spanned a generation.

  Fatima had settled on the planet with the wolves sensing that the interaction between the humans and these intelligent creatures could be the story of a career. She was right. She had filed reports quarterly and all of her reports had been broadcast on the Constant News Network.

  The wolves quickly established a boundary line beyond which the humans were not to travel. The humans could live on the coastal plains, but could not pass into the foothills or the mountains beyond. Since the most arable land was adjacent to the river deltas and the foothills were not as good for the agricultural processes necessary to feed the human population, the wolves were not challenged on their territorial restrictions.

  Large expanses of the coastal plains were planted with grains and fruits as appropriate to the climate and soil type. Pastures were created for the livestock. The small varmints that were one of the wolves’ favorite prey thrived on the new crops. The wolves, for their part, ate them keeping the varmint population from completely destroying the crops. A small bird that the wolves also depended on for prey discovered that the livestock stirred up one of its favorite foods from the ground and they thrived both on the bugs and the abundance of seeds in the livestock’s droppings. Ecologically, they filled a niche occupied by the “cattle egret” on Earth.

  A third type of animal analogous to an earthly raccoon feasted on the human trash heaps. The wolves devoured these animals as well. The wolf population stabilized based on the increased food supply and new hierarchies developed within the wolf society. Groups of three or four wolves routinely trotted through the towns inspecting and observing. They made no attempt to eat the chickens that wandered loose on the streets, but they did make a game of scaring them.

  Three years after the humans had established the settlements a nine year old girl had “gone exploring” into the wooded area beyond the settlement. The wolves had intercepted her and, snapping and snarling, had herded her back to the settlement. A toddler wandered to the edge of a stream behind her house and the wolves dragged her by her hand back to her parents. A pair of teenagers, intent on a tryst in the woods were surrounded by wolves and forced to return to the settlement. The wolves had a particular snapping and snarling sound they made when they wanted a human to do something. The humans learned quickly what that meant and did whatever the wolves wanted.

  Fatima married the photographer who had made the first contact with the wolves by feeding the one who had been observing him. He claimed no religion, but agreed to let Fatima bring up the children as she saw fit. They had two girls. Fatima, her husband and the two girls were the only humans allowed to travel beyond the boundaries and then they always had a wolf escort.

  Ten years after the humans had settled on the planet amongst the wolves the two populations had settled into a respectful, if distant, relationship. Fatima’s husband was out alone documenting wildlife in the wooded areas when he lost his balance and fell over a cliff. He died not long after hitting the ground. One of the wolves that escorted him ran for Fatima. Grabbing Fatima’s hand, the wolf dragged her to where her husband had fallen. Fatima cried and the wolves cried with her. It was a low keening noise not unlike the coyote of the American Southwest.

  One of the male wolves collected one of the men who had been especially friendly with the wolves and brought him to the site. Seated in a circle, together the humans and the wolves mourned the death of the first person who had made contact between the populations. For the next three nights the wolves gathered on the hilltops and howled in mourning. On the fourth day, life returned to normal. The wolves picked a new human who was allowed to explore and two of the juvenile female wolves “adopted” Fatima’s daughters. The wolves would show up each morning to escort the girls to school and would return to escort them home. The girls and the wolves developed games they would play and on days when there was no school, the wolves, the girls and the girls’ friends spent most of their days together.

  The following year, not long after the spring thaw, the wolves came running into one of the towns closest to the river delta. They were howling and keening. When the humans came out to see what was going on, the female wolves herded the women and children out of the settlement to higher ground where they made the humans sit and wait. The male wolves herded the men and older boys up the river to the site of a natural dam that had been formed by debris that had become wedged in a narrow part of the river. The dam appeared to be in danger of breaking. The water released from the lake that had formed upstream would flood the town and an area the wolves prized as a place to raise their young. They had dragged the humans to this site because they needed the help.

  One of the men quickly took charge. Working day and night, while the wolves quietly watched, the humans brought fire hoses and pumps with which they began to drain the lake relieving pressure on the dam. They dug a series of retention ponds to capture the water in case the dam broke before they could get the lake drained. They deepened the river’s channel so that the water that was not held by the retention ponds would flow quickly to the ocean.

  The dam broke the fifth day after the wolves had summoned the humans to the dam. The retention ponds held most of the water and what the ponds did not hold flowed harmlessly to the ocean. The settlement and the wolf breeding area escaped damage. The man who had taken charge and the alpha wolf stood on a small hill and admired the r
esult. The wolf gave a single bark and all the wolves disappeared into the forest.

  The wolves knew that the Swordsmen soldiers and the humans who they had befriended were not the same. The Swordsmen had slipped through and landed without challenging the planet’s space defenses. Within minutes, the wolf warning system had alerted the other wolves that some sort of invasion was happening and “their” humans were in danger. As they had done with the dam incident, the female wolves rounded up the female humans with the children and escorted them to hidden caves in the mountains where before they had been forbidden to go. The male wolves went with the male humans while the humans collected their weapons. Together, joined by ever increasing numbers of male wolves, the humans marched to the Swordsman base.

  Under the cover of darkness, the wolves attacked first. The battle was silent, fast and bloody. A single swipe by a wolf’s sharply clawed front paw would rip out a sleeping soldier’s throat. Within minutes of the start of the attack hundreds of silent trails of bloody paw prints covered the floors of the prefab buildings the Swordsmen used for their base. The Swordsmen who were able to grab their weapons were left to the humans who killed them with their laser rifles. Between dusk and the following mid-day ten thousand Swordsman soldiers died with the loss of twenty wolves and a hundred of the defending humans.

  Alerted by the ground defenses of the Swordsman landing, the planet’s space defenses attacked the Swordsman fleet. The battle there had been more costly for the defenders than the ground battle had been, but the Swordsmen were eventually defeated.

  Fatima’s most recent report had speculated on why the wolves had accepted the colonists, but had reacted so violently to the Swordsmen. Her daughter had made a comment that suggested a possible rationale. The wolves generally accepted half-starved solitary males from other packs. Sometimes they allowed the male to stay, other times they sent him away after nursing him back to health. The welcome was cordial and without rancor. Wandering family groups of mixed males and females with youngsters were welcomed. They were often protected and the youngsters were allowed to choose mates from the residents before the family moved on more or less a few members.

  Wandering groups of well-fed males were always met with force. The resident alpha male confronted the leader of the travelers and warned him off. If the travelers did not back down, the residents would attack the travelers in much the same manner as the wolves had attacked the Swordsmen.

  The colonists had always sent mixed groups. Even the initial survey teams had included both male and female team members. The children followed quickly after the initial teams landed. Fatima concluded that the inclusion of women and children in the colonists’ groups had made the difference between developing a cooperative relationship with the wolves or being slashed to death in their sleep.

  After reading the report, Rachel turned in.

  GENERATIONS - CHAPTER FOUR

  RACHEL CALLED FOR A PRIVATE meeting with Timothy. She met him in his office.

  “You don’t trust him, do you?” Timothy asked.

  “Faye Anne is the only intelligence officer I trust,” Rachel replied. “And we have our moments.”

  “What do you want me to tell him?”

  “We’re not going,” Rachel replied.

  “But?” Timothy stopped when Rachel raised her hand.

  “Tell him we’re not going. He will return to his ship and dispatch his courier missiles. Intercept the couriers and bring them to Elizabeth for analysis. Impound his ship and crew.” She grinned. “We are not going and he is not going with us.”

  Timothy smiled. “I understand. I will prepare the authorizations for a combat readiness exercise. What do you need?”

  Rachel handed him a list.

  Timothy scanned the list. “Consider it done. Do you have a name for the exercise?”

  “Homeward Bound,” Rachel said. “We’ll take Homestead back along the way. That will be the real combat exercise.”

  “Homestead is special to you.” Timothy stated.

  “I grew up there. It’s the first planet I defended. I was angry when I learned that the Federation’s Advanced Pilot Training Center could not defend it from the Swordsmen,” Rachel replied. “Faye Anne believes that since the planet is so close to Swordsman headquarters, it will be lightly defended. We will have an operational test there before going after the home planet which we know to be well defended.”

  “As I said in the meeting, I defer to your judgment, but I would much rather you stayed here,” Timothy said.

  “I know,” Rachel said. “But we have to do this.”

  “I will pray for your safe return.”

  * * * * *

  The Commodore from Intelligence sent the couriers as anticipated and they were intercepted. Faye Anne’s suspicions were confirmed by the multiple couriers to multiple locations. After Timothy read the report that the intercepted couriers informed both the Swordsmen and Federation high commands that the Queen Elizabeth was not going on the mission, Timothy called Rachel and Faye Anne to his office.

  “The Federation must be full of double agents. How did you know?” Timothy asked.

  “I didn’t,” Faye Anne replied with a shrug. “I don’t trust anyone and I play my hunches.”

  “I have impounded his ship and sequestered his crew. I will hold them for interrogation,” Timothy said. “I understand you learned interrogation techniques from the Swordsmen.”

  “I learned torture techniques from the Swordsmen. That’s not the same as interrogation,” Faye Anne commented.

  “We’ll let them stew for a bit,” Rachel said bristling at the reminder of how she, Faye Anne and other members of her family and crew had been tortured by the Swordsmen until their children under Saul’s command had rescued them by assaulting a Swordsman installation with two PI ships and a handful of drones. “Keep them in isolation until just before we leave.”

  * * * * *

  The next six weeks were filled with frenetic activity as the fleet prepared to depart. There was no shortage of volunteers to go on the mission. No one believed the cover story, but if anyone knew the true target, it was not discussed openly. All anyone said publicly was that wherever Rachel and Wren were going, it would probably involve killing Swordsmen and that was fine with them. Timothy helped develop a new cover story that they were meeting a convoy traveling through an area with increased pirate activity. The story had been true often enough before the attack that it should have aroused no suspicions except that no one on the station believed it.

  The Glass-ruptor performed well in its initial tests. One of its biggest benefits was that, like the Disruptor, it could be retrieved, refueled, recharged and reused. The glass drones had originally been built in two varieties. The larger recon drones were independently hyper-capable, but the weapons drones were not. The recon drone could collect its data and return for debriefing and re-use. The weapons drone was equipped with explosive warheads which meant they were good for a single use. Unlike the typical warhead which blew its target apart, the Disruptor used sympathetic vibration to destroy a ship’s higher level electronics leaving the ship intact with its crew alive, but no longer a threat. Applying electronic warfare to communications satellites would render a planet less able to defend itself. While hardly defenseless, since command and control depended so heavily on satellite communications, the planet would be easier to take.

  The Queen Elizabeth left first. She would meet the rest of the expeditionary force at a rendezvous point. She had to pick up eighteen thousand mercenaries, “contractors” in the more polite parlance of the news media, from a planet that specialized in training such personnel culled from prisons all over the galaxy. The Swordsmen had pioneered the recruitment and training of such armies, but former Federation Marines had perfected the process. The men and women in the program were too dangerous to let loose in society, but with their own kind they worked out well. As combatants, they were so successful that the conventional armies, pirates and the crimin
als they routinely faced generally surrendered rather than fight them. Even the Swordsmen had elected not to challenge them on their home territory. That was an error of judgment the Swordsmen were about to regret.

  “Hawk Squadron”, Wren’s battle group, included Tracker, Huntress and fourteen fully armed and crewed Pirate Interdiction warships attached to their modified Class Seven cargo ship tender which housed their support staff of a hundred people. Wren’s crew was younger than the people who gravitated toward Rachel and the Queen Elizabeth. As the ranks filled in, Wren and Rachel fretted over the relative inexperience of Wren’s crews, but other than training, there was little they could do.

  Tracker and Huntress did indeed get along well. Huntress had been loaded with the latest updates to the PI ships’ software. Tracker made Huntress sentient and Huntress repaid the favor by bringing Tracker and the rest of the ships in the squadron up to speed on the latest research and development. After much discussion, Tracker and Huntress, rather than Wren and Kim, decided who would fill out their human crew. Wren would take the front seat, the “pilot” position, in Tracker and a fire control specialist with impressive skills who had arrived from Eretz in the same convoy that had carried Huntress, named Dustin, would take the fire control seat. Huntress had been adamant that Matilda ride in her fire control seat behind Kim in spite of the fact that Matilda was an engineer and had no combat experience. Matilda was thrilled that Huntress wanted her but there was more to it than even Huntress knew. Matilda explained it to them over dinner the day before they left.

  “Are you sure you want to put your head in the lion’s mouth?” Wren had asked.

  “I don’t think you understand,” Matilda replied. “The safest place I can be is with you.”

  “We’re going into combat,” Wren protested. “How safe is that?”

  “Since Greg first set foot in a PI ship, no member of the extended Solomon family has ever been killed in battle,” Matilda said. “Not even defeated. You have lost ships and crew along the way, but even those losses were much smaller than any similar force might have faced under similar circumstances. Look at the numbers. Compare the two ships and crews you lost in the recent battle with the losses everyone else took. Even your grandmother with only one ship lost a greater percentage of her crew and sustained more damage than you did and you had a totally green crew. Half of them had never seen a battle before.”