Childers

by Richard F. Weyand

  "OK."

  "Oh, and Jake? I didn't ask for it. It's some wild hair of yours. Routine intelligence collection. Whatever. But it's not for me," Jan said.

  "Of course not."

  A few months in, and everything settled down, Jan and Bill were relaxing after dinner out on the patio. Jan was feeding Peggy, who'd moved onto bottle feeding at one year. It was a very contented time.

  "How long are you going to keep this job?" Bill asked.

  "Why?"

  "I could really get used to this. That dinner was amazing."

  "No different than any other day," Jan said.

  "Yeah, I know. That's what's so amazing."

  Jan looked over at Bill. Maybe now is good, she thought.

  "You know, I've been thinking. We had said something about two years being a good interval," Jan said.

  Bill looked over at her.

  "But Peggy's only fifteen months old."

  "And fifteen plus nine divided by twelve is how much?"

  "Huh."

  "If you want a two-year interval, the time is now."

  "Right now?" Bill asked.

  Jan laughed, and looked at her watch.

  "How about in two hours? Let me get this one to bed."

  "Deal."

  She met occasionally for lunch with the Chief of Naval Research. At one of their meetings, Jan posed a question.

  "Kurt, if something were to happen to Sigurdsen – oh, I don't know, an earthquake or an enemy bombardment or something – and we had to rebuild it, how long would it take?"

  "First thing you would have to do is draw up the plans for replacement. That could take a while. And then it's a big construction project. You would have to throw up a bunch of temporary buildings first. Then build the permanent buildings. It could take quite a while."

  "Could we shorten that process if we had plans all drawn up in advance? Disaster planning sort of thing?"

  "Oh, sure. You could get to building right away."

  "What about stocking up on temporary buildings some place off-site? You know. The materials needed. Would that help on timeframes?"

  "You're serious?"

  "Yes, I'm serious."

  "Well, sure. That would help as well. Procurement delays are notorious."

  "Why don't we do those things then? Just in case?"

  At her next quarterly meeting with each of her division heads, Jan gave each of them an extra assignment.

  "I want you to do a little assignment for me. If your section of Sigurdsen was going to be completely rebuilt, what would you do? Not sky's the limit – plan to a realistic budget. But assume you could demolish all the buildings on your section of the base and replace them with more modern buildings that better meet your current and projected needs. What would you do?

  "Draw up those plans for me, and then let me have them. Figure, say, six months to a year. Take the time to get them right.

  "Oh, and keep this close. I can't do it for everybody. If it gets out, I might not be able to do it at all."

  The CNR was doing the same thing with his division heads.

  Jan periodically went down to the basements to work with Admiral Jessen and his planning crew. Whenever they needed something, and somebody asked, "What project is this for?" the other person would just say, "Jessen." So Jessen became the de facto project name.

  About a year into the project, things started to get reorganized here and there on Sigurdsen. It was subtle, and didn't happen all at once.

  The way in which supplies were procured and stored was modified, so that supplies came in pre-packed into the shipboard containers. In addition, items with a longer shelf life were queued in advance, with a nine-month supply on hand at all times.

  When software and data updates were made to ships, a new category under "standing orders" included "Code Black Orders." The contents of those folders were encrypted. They were occasionally updated, along with other data uploads to the ships.

  Evacuation drills were practiced on the base, in which spacers would all assemble for the 'buses' that would take them off base. Everyone on Sigurdsen had a reporting area, where he would queue with others heading for the same location. Each was told to keep a list of what went into their bug-out bag – personal necessities, changes of uniform, personal items of value, real or sentimental. And they were expected to pack that bag and show up with it at drills within two hours.

  Groups of spacers signing off base to go into town were issued emergency drill trinkets to carry in a pocket. When they buzzed and lighted, all personnel were to report back to the base immediately for evacuation.

  These changes were implemented at irregular intervals, over a period of nine months or so. They seemed like minor, disparate changes, but they were all part of a single plan.

  Maximilian "Max" Childers Campbell was born when Jan's side project, de facto codename Jessen, was about a year in, with a year to go. Senior Chief Maximilian Voipers (retired), known as Max Viper to friends and foes alike, had retired with thirty years in the service about fifteen years prior. He lived in Jezgra, where he ran a heavy construction business. Jan and Bill occasionally saw him at social occasions, such as the annual Fleet Day, when Sigurdsen was open to retirees for the festivities. He came out to The Hill to visit his namesake, and it was a sight to see the sleeping newborn happily cuddled up into the crook of an arm bigger than he was.

  Eighteen months into the project, Intelligence Division delivered to Jan, and she gave to Jessen, the complete plans for the Earth's VR network. Everything was finally coming together.

  Just short of two years in, Jessen considered them prepared. If the Earth fleet came calling, they would be ready.

  Code Black

  It was a bit after 5:30 in the morning. Jan was up and dressed, in the breakfast nook eating her breakfast, when the emergency call came in on her phone.

  "Childers."

  "Jessen, Ma'am. Five hundred warships split among four classes. Earth standard design. Another hundred ships logistics and supply. Coming in from the north. Hyper transition fourteen minutes ago."

  "Looks like they really mean it. Your recommendation, Tien?"

  "It's Code Black, Ma'am. Right on profile."

  "Do it. Childers out."

  "Code Black, Code Black, Code Black. This is not a drill. Black 5, Black 5, Black 5." The message went out to all CSF units in Jablonka space. It was followed by a 1000-character decrypt key, to allow admirals and ship's captains to finally decrypt the Code Black orders that had been kept updated in their computer systems.

  Those orders were specific on a per-ship basis, and a lot of things started to happen at once.

  Thirty-one destroyers or courier ships in Jablonka were detached from their commands and immediately headed at their best speed for the southern system periphery, opposite the incoming Earth armada. One to each of the Commonwealth planets, to repeat the Code Black message and its decrypt key. As soon as they hit the outer envelope, they transitioned into hyperspace.

  Four fast shuttles left Sigurdsen, fanning out across Jablonka. Each planetary member of the Commonwealth had three members on the Council, and they and their families were being evacuated. Three additional Council members were on an inspection tour of Sigurdsen this week, and one shuttle was dispatched to their hotel to pick them up. The other three went straight to the Councilor's homes, or in one case to a local restaurant, following the now-activated radio signals of the ID tags they wore. They took the simple expedient of making a hot landing on the lawn or street, bundling the Councilor and his family aboard, and heading straight to battleships in orbit.

  Logistics stores on the planet had been systematized and the inventory was maintained in the large containers used shipboard for easy evacuation. Cargo tractors began pulling long trains of stacked containers out of warehouse doors onto the ready pad. Cargo shuttles, intended to lift the heavy containers to space, began ferrying the containers to CSF freighters in orbit.

  Sirens wailed across Sigu
rdsen. "Emergency evacuation. Code Black. Emergency evacuation. Code Black. This is not a drill."

  There were tears in Jan's eyes as she said goodbye to her babies. Max, now twenty-two months old, didn't understand anything was wrong, and gave her a big hug before she handed him off to Katy, her primary childcare for the morning, who had just come on.

  Peggy, almost four, knew something was up.

  When Jan squatted down to hug her, she asked, "Mommy, why are you crying?"

  "Ask Kay-Kay, Honey. Mommy has to go to work now."

  "They'll be OK with us, Ma'am. We've done our drills, too. You go now and do what you need to do," George said.

  Jan and Bill took the car down The Hill into the base. They dropped Bill at the Intelligence Division headquarters. He gave her a quick peck before he got out.

  "See you aboard."

  The base was in a state of controlled, pre-planned bedlam. People queuing at the 'bus' stops were surprised when senior non-coms used flares to lay out landing points on the lawns of the base next to the queuing points. Shuttles started dropping from ships in orbit, screaming in under combat landing protocols, and landing on the lawns in front of them.

  "All right! Saddle up! Hustle it!"

  As Jan went into the NOC, sappers with UV lights were setting demolition and incendiary charges on the marks that had been painted in UV paint on the inside and the outside of the building years before. The commander in charge was checking them off from a list as they were emplaced.

  She walked into the building behind an electronics team that was headed to the server farm in the secure basements, to pull the memory modules with the redundant server backups that were running right now in response to the Code Black.

  When Jan got there, her office was abuzz with people getting ready to depart. She punched a code into the intercom.

  "Jessen."

  "Childers. Tien, what's my ship?"

  "Lakshmibai."

  "And her captain?"

  "Pavel Nimsky."

  "Excellent. See you aboard. Childers out."

  In queue for evacuation, Petty Officer First Class Charlie Gunderson was grousing. The intel that Jablonka was being attacked by an Earth fleet had run completely through the base within thirty minutes of the Code Black alarm.

  "I don't like this buggin' out. We should fight 'em."

  "We are fightin' 'em," Senior Chief Ashok Gonzalez said.

  "How do you figure?"

  "How long we been doin' evac drills?"

  "Couple years."

  "We ever do evac drills before Childers was NCO? Ever?"

  "No."

  "See."

  "I don't get it."

  "This is all her plan. She's got a plan to fight 'em, and she'll win."

  "Her plan?"

  "She's always got a plan."

  "How do you know?"

  "I was at Kodu."

  "Oh."

  Three passenger liners in orbit were commandeered. Two were empty of passengers, one had just taken passengers aboard. The evacuation shuttles from Sigurdsen were ferrying base personnel to the empty two while the other was being evacuated.

  One shuttle came down and landed in a special landing zone next to the Naval Operations Center. The flares they used for this landing zone were different colored than the others, so the pilot could see it on his approach in the pre-dawn light. Jan and her staff, Jessen and his staff, and Bill and his staff from Intelligence Division all crowded aboard.

  The pilot took off and made for the CSS Lakshmibai.

  Jan and Bill took the Admiral's cabin on Lakshmibai. Megan Ming and Tien Jessen took other cabins on the flag deck, as did Bill's subordinate who ran the intelligence team for the Earth problem, Rear Admiral Leslie Hurley. Their staffs took bunks in the spaces assigned to Lakshmibai's Marines, who were being offloaded when they arrived.

  The intelligence team took over the Combat Information Center.

  Jan met with her new flag captain, Pavel Nimsky, who she knew from the Grand Tour and Kodu.

  They knew it couldn't be known in advance which ships would be on station in Sigurdsen at the time the Code Black came, if it did. They would have to work with whoever was on station. Jan had lucked out. Pavel Nimsky was good.

  Jan briefed him on the operation, and the role of the Lakshmibai.

  She also oversaw the rest of the evacuation operation.

  When everybody was off Sigurdsen, she gave Pavel Nimsky the order, and the Lakshmibai sent the signal that detonated all the demolitions, and imploded and then set afire the major buildings on Sigurdsen.

  Jan and Bill transferred to the CPS Star Runner, a passenger liner of the Commonwealth Star Lines, for the crossing to the rendezvous point. There was no way she was going to spend the month in transit without her kids if she didn't have to, and Lakshmibai was no place for toddlers.

  One of the Star Runner's shuttles was docked to the Lakshmibai waiting for them. They made the transfer to the Star Runner. Star Runner began maneuvers to leave the system just as soon as Jan and Bill were belted into the swivel chairs in their cabin. They had an interconnected set of suites in the first-class cylinder for them, the kids, their household staff, and their staff's families.

  The CSF ships – the loaded freighters, the passenger liners, and the warships – all spaced for the southern approaches to Jablonka, away from the incoming Earth fleet. In ones and twos and threes, as they were ready to depart, they headed out. As they reached the outer system envelope, they transitioned into hyper and set out for the rendezvous point, an uninhabited system ten days spacing from Earth.

  Four hours into hyperspace, over the intercom of all the ships in transit, the following recording was played:

  "Fellow Spacers:

  "This is Admiral Jan Childers, the Chief of Naval Operations of the Commonwealth Space Force. Many of you know me personally or have worked with me over the years. Many of you know me simply as Jan.

  "You may be wondering, 'Why are we running away?' or 'Why aren't we fighting?'

  "While this attack may have come as a surprise to you, it most assuredly did not come as a surprise to me and others in the command structure of the CSF. We have been planning for this eventuality for years.

  "We are not running away. We are taking the fight to the enemy. We will assemble our own forces, rather than waste them piecemeal against a large Earth fleet, and then we will space against Earth itself.

  "Once assembled into a single fighting force, the Commonwealth Space Force will be the largest space fleet ever fielded. We will space to Earth, invest the planet, and overthrow the corrupt government that has launched this attack against us.

  "No, fellow spacers, we are not running away. We are running toward the enemy. We will prevail, and we will make them rue the day they took up arms against the Commonwealth of Free Planets.

  "Childers out."

  When the cheers died down, Senior Chief Gonzalez elbowed PO1/C Gunderson where they were standing in line for chow in the Economy Class Dining Room of one of the passenger liners.

  "See? Told ya. She's a corker, that one is."

  "I expected them to be cowards, but I didn't expect them to just up and run," said Fleet Admiral Jacob Turner, commanding the Earth Expeditionary Fleet.

  "Something bothers me about this, Sir. Of course, we're an overwhelming force, but I didn't expect them not to give us any resistance at all. That doesn't sound like the CSF. And their departure was so orderly, it was almost like they planned for us to attack them," said Rear Admiral Fritz Schmidt, Fleet Tactical Officer.

  "Well, Fritz, I don't have any worries about that. They couldn't have seen this coming."

  Fritz shrugged.

  "Let's leave Admiral Gortny here, and move on to Valore," Turner said.

  As the Code Black message spread across the Commonwealth, the scenario repeated itself again and again. The CSF pulled up stakes and pulled out of the system.

  "Where the hell did they all go? This is the fourth syst
em and there's no CSF anywhere," Turner said.

  "Doesn't make sense. Unless they're combining their forces to assemble a big enough fleet to oppose us," Schmidt said.

  "I'm getting a really bad feeling about this. I'm afraid I know where they went. We need to issue new spacing orders."

  "To where?"

  "To Earth."

  Earth

  It took them a little over three weeks to get to the rendezvous point from Sigurdsen. The freighters were slower, as not all of them were fleet freighters. And the Code Black had to propagate out from Sigurdsen to the other fleet bases. Notice to the closer ones was tasked to destroyers, while the available fast courier boats went to the farther Commonwealth planets.

  Those fleets then had to space to the rendezvous. The longest trip there was almost six weeks.

  The result was that the first ships to arrive, those from Sigurdsen, waited almost seven weeks while the fleet assembled.

  As each contingent came in, they brought their own fleet freighters. And slower non-fleet freighters were drifting in all the time. All the warships were restocked as they arrived.

  The other thing that the freighters brought were remote control beam mounts. Lots of them. Over three thousand of them had been stashed with the stores on various bases and came in on the freighters. These beam mounts were the new version, that had latching mechanisms meant to connect to the warships' aft cargo racks, between the radiators. Those aft cargo racks were only used on long voyages for extra stores, but they came in handy now. The beam mounts were distributed by the cargo shuttles of the freighters and latched to the warships, which required the orbiting vessels to halt rotation, latch the beam mounts to the ship, and then resume rotation.