Echo of Tomorrow: Book Two (The Drake Chronicles)

by Rob Buckman

  “Got you!” Brock whispered.

  “Son of a …”

  “Now, now, Admiral, is that any way to talk to your subordinates?” Brock said.

  “We have one more duty to perform,” Brock continued. “Sublieutenant Katharina Moore, front and center!”

  Kat jumped in surprise, wishing she hadn’t, and remembered to come to attention before saluting. “Sublieutenant Moore reporting as ordered, sir!” she squeaked, hearing Scott chuckle behind her.

  “By the power invested in me by his Majesty the King, the Government of the United Kingdom, the Emperor of Japan and the President of the World Council, I hereby appoint you to the rank of Group Captain. You are hereby requested and required by the Articles of War to take up the said duties and responsibility of the position of Group Captain effective immediately and prosecute the war against any and all enemies that threaten the safety and well-being of the people of this planet. Congratulations Group Captain,” he said, extending his hand. Kat recovered quicker than Scott and shook hands all round, smiling and accepting gracefully, finally getting her voice back.

  “We’ll talk about shorts later,” she whispered to Scott as they shook hands.

  The First Sea Lord said, looking around, “Right! That’s got over with, where is the mess, I’m hungry. The in-flight service was horrible.” He laughed.

  “This way,” Brock announced, and led the march across the hangar to a waiting staff car, with Kat and Scott trailing the others.

  “I suppose it was inevitable really,” Kat said to Scott. “This whole deal is so screwed up, it was the only logical course of action.”

  “Admiral of the Fleet?” Scott muttered. “I’d hoped they’d pick someone else and give me a chance to get my feet wet.”

  “Who on earth, literally, is there except you?” she asked, cocking an eyebrow.

  “Well, I don’t know, but you’d think his nibs over there would have wanted it.” Even before he finished saying it, Kat was shaking her head.

  “The First Sea Lord is a saltwater sailor. He’d be the first to tell you he knows next to nothing about running a space fleet, nor has any combat experience to boot.”

  “So what makes him think I do?”

  “Ask him!” It was a logical suggestion. Scott waited until the meal was served, tucking away a good-sized meal before he did, which made him feel a hundred percent better. After several more cups of coffee, he broached the question.

  “Why did we pick you?” the First Sea Lord replied.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Drop the ‘sir,’ we don’t need all that nonsense between us. My first name is Anthony, and inevitably, it ends up as Tony. However, to answer your question, it wasn’t just me. The question came up at a meeting six months ago between Colonel Brock, myself, the PM, the representative from Japan, and believe it or not, the President of the World Council, President Westwood. It was concluded that you were the only logical choice, and the only one with the combat experience to hold the rank.”

  “That doesn’t make sense, you should have taken the position,” Scott said, but Tony shook his head, looking sad.

  “I have no experience of combat whatsoever, and neither do any of my colleagues. Ours is all theoretical.” That was true, Scott silently agreed. “Colonel Brock has his hands full with putting together an army. Lieutenant Colonel Pete Mitchell has the headache of organizing the logistics and running your intel division, Major Jeff Turner is working his ass off getting the ships built, so he’s out.”

  “What about …” Scott stopped and looked over at Pete. They were right. Pete didn’t have the experience, and neither did any of the other recently promoted officers he could think of.

  “The decision wasn’t made in haste, and the PM was concerned that you might not do well at the academy.” That brought a smile around the table. “As it turned out, you were top of your class, far exceeding any of ours, and the instructors’, expectations. You have an instinctive grasp of military strategy, both in two dimensions, and three, and that’s the key to all this.”

  “I don’t know any more about running a bloody space fleet than the man in the moon, I’m a ground pounder, a tank man.”

  “They don’t know any more than you,” Pete shot back. Scott had forgotten there were men on the moon now.

  “You have the experience of running large combined-arms forces, and you were the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, so in many ways there is little difference. It’s all a matter of using the forces, manpower, and equipment under your command to their fullest potential.”

  Put like that, there wasn’t a lot of difference, Scott realized. If you took out the space part, you were left with organizing air, ground, and naval forces to take on an enemy. Put aside the fact he’d almost be doing it from scratch, it was doable.

  Tony continued. “Every day, more and more men and woman pour in, and we’re training them as fast as we can. You’ll get the best of the best under your direct command to do the everyday running of the ship. Remember, as the admiral of the fleet, you are not the ship’s captain. He runs the ship, you tell all the captains what to do, and how you want it done.”

  Scott looked thoughtful, and the more he thought about it, the more sense it made. “I suppose you’re right, but what sort of fleet will I have to work with?” He looked at Brock and Pete, seeing them smiling, each thinking of the slab-sided, ugly monstrosities they’d first cobbled together.

  “You’ll have one battleship, two small fighter carriers, four heavy cruisers, eight light cruisers, sixteen destroyers, and thirty-two corvettes, plus ancillary vessels, a supply train, oilers, colliers, and other specialized vessels. Is that enough?” Tony asked.

  “Ye gods, you have been busy.”

  “You could say that. Not all of us get to take a vacation in sunny climes,” said Gunny Brock.

  “Sunny climes, have you stayed in England during the wint— What on Earth do I need oilers and a collier for?” That brought a chuckle around the table.

  “Have you forgotten everything already?” Brock said. “It’s a generic term for the ship that carries fuel, water, coolant, gases, extra missiles, food stores, and torpedoes in this case.”

  “Oh! I get it.” Scott felt himself color slightly at his forgetfulness of the older terms for the fleet train. “How the hell did you manage it?” he asked, wondering what sort of ships these were. He imagined another cobbled-together fleet out of whatever was handy.

  “That English design engineer you brought back turned out to be a genius,” said Pete. “The moment he saw the potential of the heavy manufacturing facilities in orbit, he went crazy organizing them into a smoothly functioning whole.”

  It wasn’t just that. The corporation that dominated Earth’s business world had no need for large ships. The biggest were the ore carriers that transported refined ore from the asteroid belt and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn to Earth, but they couldn’t be considered real ships. They were more like a giant wheel-like gantry with a control module at one end, and a gravity drive unit at the other. The ore bins were simply slid into the “spokes” of the gantry, one after the other, stacked end to end. That wasn’t to say that the solar furnace and gravity-forging systems weren’t capable of producing anything the size they needed; they were. Devon Hawking had just reorganized them a different way and expanded on their capacities. Now the crucible at the center of the solar mirror beam was five times the size it had been, and capable of processing enough pure nickel iron to form into huge, six-foot-thick plates up to a hundred feet long and fifty feet wide. If the scuttlebutt was halfway correct, Devon was looking to build something much bigger so he could form the complete hull of a cruiser-size ship in one forming. That would go a long way to speeding up the production of larger warships.

  “So the design team managed to settle on a design and everything?” Scott said.

  “They did, in conjunction with Jeff Turner and his team,” said Tony.

  “And the device?”


  “Oh that, yes it did turn out to be a very interesting bit of engineering,” Pete said. “It’s a navigational system. We duplicated it, tested it, improved on it, and it is now installed on every ship of the fleet, along with the translated nav information.”

  “That won’t do us much good until we can get out in this system,” Scott murmured.

  “True to a degree, but we now know where, and how they’re entering the solar system. We can at least mine the entrances, or put a blocking fleet there to stop them escaping,” Pete answered.

  “That presupposes that we can build sufficient mines, or ships to act as a blockage in the first place,” Scott observed, seeing them nod. “What’s the estimated completion date for the fleet?”

  “Essentially it’s ready now,” Pete replied. “Most of the ships are in the final fitting stage or under run-up trials and the crews are already aboard—”

  “The new captains will be reading themselves in within the next few hours, and they can start their shakedown runs,” Brock interjected.

  Scott made a few notes on his wristcomp, his mind working out the details of how to utilize that many ships. The first sea lord gently nudged the man on each side of him, nodding at Scott. They looked at him, then at Scott, nodding in agreement that they’d made the right choice, since Scott was already working on the problem of deploying his fleet.

  “What about fighter and bomber cover? You mentioned carriers?” Scott asked, absently.

  “Each of the carriers has the capacity for five hundred space fighters and bombers, as yet you only have three hundred, due to some manufacturing defect,” Pete answered.

  “Run that by me again?” Scott said, looking up. Something in the way Pete said it told him something was wrong.

  “We didn’t have the capacity here, or in space to build the fighters, so we asked the President of the World Council if he could recommend a manufacturer to do it for us. He found one man who builds anti-grav vehicles and persuaded him to build them to our design. The first one hundred arrived on time, and seemed to be working perfectly, but the first time they went into space and started pulling combat maneuvers they broke up. We were lucky not to lose any pilots.”

  “So what happened?”

  “On inspection, we found many hidden defects, and if it hadn’t been for the fact we needed to train in space and not just in air, we would never have found them until the first time we went into combat.”

  “So it was a deliberate defect that only occurred in space?” Scott shot Pete a look.

  “Right. We checked back with the factory but couldn’t locate where the defect originated. The design team here checked with the engineer in the factory, tracing it down to an error in several of the robotics manufacturing computers.”

  “Random error?”

  “Hell no!” Pete snapped, not bothering to hide his contempt for the present world government. “This was a deliberate attempt at sabotage. But there are no fingerprints to lead back to who.”

  “Well, we know the Ayatollah and his merry men directed it, so where are we right now?”

  “Rebuilding all the new fighters from scratch, with our people double-checking the computer programming every step of the way.”

  “I should bloody well hope so, but it pisses me off. We could be using those men here, instead of playing nursemaid to a bunch of robots,” was Brock’s contribution.

  “You see any way around it?” Scott shot back.

  Pete nodded. “It’s in the works now. We transferred all airframe manufacturing to England and Ireland with the relevant equipment, and the ones coming from there are even better.” Pete smiled as he said it.

  Kat looked up from her second plate of steak and eggs with fries on the side. “Thank Christ for that. I’d hate my people to go into combat with a craft they don’t trust.”

  “Are any of the craft already onboard suspect?” Scott asked.

  “No, sir. That was one of the first items we checked on. They’re all clean,” Pete answered. “And, again, I think deliberate. They wanted us to think everything was hunky-dory.”

  “Good, but more fool them.”

  “These people have no concept of sabotage, as we understand it. At the moment it’s just small, random crap that’s more annoying and time-wasting than anything. Like substandard material, missing or out-of-spec parts,” added Brock.

  Kat chuckled. “You’ve got that right, Colonel Brock. Military contractors trying to slip in substandard material is as old as the Roman Empire.”

  “It’s like a bunch of kids trying to pull the wool over their parent’s eyes. They forget we’ve already been there and done that,” she added.

  “Too right!” Brock snapped. “Can’t believe the junk the military’s palmed off on me and my men over the years.”

  “Let’s not fall into the trap of underestimating the Ayatollah and his minions.” Scott reminded them. “All this might be new to them, but I’m betting they’re fast learners. Remember the suicide bombers of old?”

  It was a somber thought. Over coffee, they discussed the overall situation with the rest of the world, and Scott found out there was growing unrest. There were calls in some quarters for all of “those violent people,” meaning the newly formed army and navy, to be sent to rehabilitation at once, or put down for the good of humanity. Others wanted the World Council to stop the spread of these ideas since more and more young people were walking around in strange-looking uniforms, pretending to be soldiers and causing trouble. What worried them even more was the number of men, and some women, who managed to board the recruit shuttles. The women simply dressed as men, and only revealed who they were after the shuttle landed and they went in to be processed. The word was getting around, and the people weren’t as peaceful as the government thought.

  It was inevitable that the recruiting-shuttle crews would run into problems with the “State Security”, or State-Sec police. It all started with what appeared to be a fight close to the shuttle port in what was once Berlin. It was the female scream of pain that caught the crew’s attention, so they went and investigated. Brock had always insisted half the recruiting team should be female, just to emphasize that women were equal in this society. What they found was three half-naked young women being savagely beaten by seven State-Sec goons. A rifle butt to the gut and chin soon had the others fleeing for their lives, and the team quickly transported the injured girls to the shuttle. It turned out that the three females had dressed up as men, dirtied their faces, and were attempting to get to the shuttle. The goons caught them, and that led to the ensuing beating. After that, Brock doubled the teams with orders to patrol the landing zone perimeter. That at least would give anybody a chance to get to the shuttle without interference. But State-Sec could still waylay the potential recruits before they reached the zone. Many of the would-be marines turned up bloodied, or with nasty injuries. The imams were screaming about “contamination” and apostates at Friday evening services, and promised terrible punishment for any man, let alone a woman daring to board the accursed “infidel” shuttle.

  “Let them scream, we’ll get on with the job at hand,” Scott said upon hearing this. In a way, it was expected. Even recruits they rejected, having seen a little of what went on here, had taken the story back with them.

  “Anything else?” he said.

  “There is one item we’re worried about,” added Pete.

  “Spill it.”

  “You remember the scenes of all those people standing around doing nothing while their children were being taken away?”

  “Yes.”

  “That puzzled me. We found a few more odd items in the warship, and I have the impression that the items are some sort of emotion-damping field,” concluded Pete. That brought raised eyebrows around the table.

  “I haven’t seen any report on this,” the First Sea Lord replied.

  “No. You wouldn’t, because we haven’t written one, for obvious reasons,” Pete answered.

  “Di
d you try any of these devices to see if you could duplicate this effect?” Scott said. An obvious question, but he knew Pete would have moved heaven and Earth to find out.

  “Yes, but so far I can’t find that they have any effect on our people, or the aliens. But, they did seem to affect our new recruits to some degree. I guess whatever Kessler did to us made the old-timers immune to the effect.”

  “What was Doc Chase’s opinion?”

  “He mumbled something about our aggression quota and adrenaline.”

  “Hum. Not very helpful,” Scott muttered.

  “He’s working on it.”

  “I hope so. I’d hate to go toe-to-toe with these assholes, and then find out half my crews can’t fight.” Scott saw people around the table nodding.