John sighed, smelled the food and turned his back to leave. His pilot said, “Sir, permission to eject Seaman Apprentice Gomez out the nearest airlock?” John grinned, “Not before he tells us where the hell he eats.”
Following Seaman Gomez’ instructions, they trudged nearly a kilometer to what was or would be a major hub of corridors. A small shack up against one bulkhead turned out to be their destination.
A female lieutenant sat inside, and looked up at them with a combination of irritation and boredom as they entered. John quietly said to his companions, “Interesting place, Jupiter Base. Wonder what it will be like when it grows up?” The lieutenant said, “Identification please, all of you.” John’s brief happy mood dissipated.
He leaned over the counter and said, trying for pleasant, but failing, “I am Captain John Chamberlin, commanding officer, Second Fleet, and you must be Admiral Grigorivich.” She continued to look irritated, although it didn’t seem to be aimed specifically at him, since she wasn’t actually looking at him. Additionally, he couldn’t yet tell if her demeanor was genetic or learned. She said, “I am not Admiral Grigorivich. Why would you think I was?”
John said, “Because he is the only officer I personally know who can legally sit down in the presence of a captain.” He may have gotten a little loud.
She was now looking at him, but seemed remarkably unaffected by John’s rank and/or temper. She slowly stood up and said, clearly under the impression that her listeners were mentally deficient, “Sir, this is not a military base, this is a civilian construction area, and according to instructions transmitted by the Secretary of the Navy, we are here at the sufferance of the civilian construction company, and are to maintain a low profile.” She apparently assumed that ‘low profile’ literally meant she was to remain seated.
John got his temper under control and said, “Who is the nominal head of that “we” you mentioned?”
She said, “I am sir.” John said, “Lieutenant, there is a war. I was happily en route to fight that war when I received orders to personally and promptly report to this ball of dirt. Why am I here?” He was definitely loud. Again.
She seemed to be remarkably immune to John’s temper. She sat back down, looked at a display on her desk and actually held up a finger. John waited, thinking that his wife would kill him if she found out he’d strangled a female officer, a federal female officer at that.
The lieutenant looked back up and said, “Sir, you were ordered here by the Secretary of the Army.” She resumed looking at her screen and added, apparently for her own edification, “The Army Corp of Engineers is charged with building Jupiter Base, and has contracted with Mitsubishi – the army lacks the resources. Um, it doesn’t say why, nor who you are to report to. Interesting. Unusual.”
John looked at the top of her head and asked, very quietly, “Lieutenant, in that document you are reading, does the name, ‘General Chamberlin’ appear anywhere?” After a short pause, she shook her head.
John said, “Lieutenant, scare up some transportation for the eight of us. We must immediately return to your hanger, wherever the hell that is, and rejoin Second fleet. While we are en route, you are to send an inquiry and find out who originated these orders. You are to forward the results of your investigation to commanding officer, Second Fleet, copy to Admiral Grigorivich, commander, First Fleet. Do you have any questions?” She asked, “Sir, I am all alone here…” John held up his hand, forestalling the rest of her excuse. He said, “Lieutenant, there is a war on – surely you’ve heard? Someone has created a set of orders that caused the commanding officer of Second Fleet to leave his command on a useless errand. We need to know who originated those orders, and I need to get the hell off this rock. Now.”
She said, “Sir, the orders originated in the…” John said, still quietly, “Lieutenant, I am not in the fucking army, I report to Admiral Grigorivich, who is also not in the fucking army. Get me transportation.”
It took fifteen minutes to get a civilian heavy hauler, another fifteen minutes to return to the hanger and nearly an hour to get elevated back to the surface, where they sat. John contacted yet another civilian, this one working for FASA, the Federal Air and Space Agency. The controller said, “Unknown flight of four, please hold for clearance.”
John had reached his limit, “Unknown controller, this is Captain Chamberlin, federal navy, flight of four heavy fighters. I require priority clearance for an immediate departure, destination Second Fleet.” He heard, “Hold one.”
John took a deep breath, but was not at all surprised that it didn’t seem to help. He asked, “Unknown controller: hold one what? Do we have clearance or not?”
After an interminable delay, John heard, “Navy flight of four, you are cleared for departure. Please be advised of multiple, uncontrolled civilian heavy haulers, restricted to less than one thousand meters. Please be advised, they don’t seem to pay much attention to unknown civilian controllers.” John’s mood improved – perhaps he could shoot an unarmed civilian contractor making four times his pay.
For this flight, John sat in the front seat. Under heavy acceleration he lifted off the pristine flight pad.
Two hours out from Ganymede, he received a comm from his favorite navy lieutenant. She said, getting straight to the point, “Captain, I haven’t been able to determine who originated the orders, and it doesn’t look as if I can easily do so, something I find most interesting. How do you wish me to proceed?” John promptly said, “Please forward everything you have to Admiral Grigorivich. Append a note informing him that I have requested his personal attention. Thank you for yours.”
She surprised John by asking, “Sir, if I were to request a transfer to your command, would you approve it?” John said, “Lieutenant, I’ve got a long, boring flight ahead of me, so why don’t you tell me about yourself? High points only.”
In thirty succinct seconds he learned that she’d been a Suma Cum Laude student since probably shortly after birth. She had three separate degrees, and lacked the slightest trace of a sense of humor. He asked, “Lieutenant, in twenty-five words or less, tell me why you want to put yourself in harms way?” She said, “Sir, while you have suffered horrendous casualties, your commands have never been defeated in combat.” There was a brief pause and he faintly heard her say, ‘fifteen’, and then she continued, “Additionally, the systems you took were treated generously. Twenty-five.”
John laughed, “Don’t request a transfer, that will take too long. Send me your…crap, your name, service number, military training, all that stuff, and I’ll request you. Faster that way. Lieutenant, have a nice day.”
John wriggled around in his couch in a largely futile effort to get comfortable. While he’d been on Ganymede, his ships had traveled a long ways, but not closer.
Chapter 35
By the time he docked on the Adams, John knew that the army had no more idea who had originated the request than he did. James grumbled, “Next time send me to Ganymede: I’d love to take a twenty minute shower.” John grinned, “Everyone who knows you feels exactly the same way.”
John spoke briefly to Admiral Khan, the admiral in charge of Fifth fleet, commonly known as Home Fleet. He was polite but distant, made more so by actually being extremely distant. He had been an admiral since before the outbreak of hostilities, and had been passed over for the position now held by Admiral Grigorivich. Reportedly, he held the position due to family influence, which is to say, politics. John didn’t really object to politics as long as the man responsible for the defense of earth and her peoples was capable. Admiral Khan had never fought in a single battle, so nobody really knew.
Every single federal system was panicked by the news that rebels were now using nuclear weapons. As a result, John had been sent to earth to help protect its five billion panicked citizens against a nuclear holocaust. John was absolutely convinced that the rebels had planned on that very result.
The admiral assigned John to the outer reaches of Earth’s sys
tem, which was highly convenient as he was already there. It occupied an area that would require approximately one point five billion fighters to properly cover; four point five billion if his crews were to expect a break now and then. It didn’t take John very long to conclude that his new boss was covering his own portly ass: an assault on Sol system would likely be in the form of a sneak attack aimed at terrorizing the populace, and/or taking out a military ship or ten, with the goal of pulling yet more combat craft away from the war front. If the assault was successful, John would be blamed for failing to stop it. If stopped, Admiral Khan would get the credit.
The ‘outer reaches’ consisted of everything from the asteroid belt of rubble outside of Mars orbit to the system limits, well, very, very well beyond the orbit of Pluto. There were uncounted billions of asteroids, ranging in size from a few meters up to many kilometers; and hundreds of proto planets up to well over one thousand kilometers in diameter. All of them offered hiding places for a single ship.
John would have loved to spend a few minutes alone with Admiral Grigorivich, but he was several hundred light years away.
He did discuss with James the odd orders that sent him to Ganymede, but neither man could figure out why their father would have done it, and if not him, they had no clue whatsoever.
On the positive side of the ledger, John was able to arrange for minimal basing facilities on Ganymede. It was the last official function provided by Lieutenant Kilpatrick, who had been assigned duty aboard the Adams. Her reassignment had proven remarkably easy to facilitate, and John was reasonably certain why.
John decided to actually stage fighters out of Base Jupiter, it’s official name once it was finished and turned over to the navy, probably some time after the war was concluded, or perhaps the next one. He was able to bring sixty-five spare fighters up out of his crammed holds, and by a little judicial rules bending, he arranged for flights of four to include just two navigators, reducing the demands on his crews.
John wasn’t actually responsible for the entire periphery. Unfortunately, what he was responsible for was not all that clear. John had to share duties with the Guard, a Federal Reserve service featuring discarded but presumably useable Navy and Naval Reserve ships and personnel. Thrown into the pot was a mix of several federal agencies that possessed serviceable spacecraft that had also been abruptly assigned to the task. Finally, various national entities, public-private ventures and three cargo handling conglomerates had been ‘asked’ to provide additional levels of security. It was a nightmare, although the Navy term was far less acceptable in mixed company, and instead of one two-syllable word, included two, one of them being ‘cluster’.
John and his brother sat down in his cabin – James was just days away from returning to active duty status – and they quickly decided to lump all the oddballs into one ‘command’, and set them patrolling the most common transit corridors. This way, they would create the appearance of great activity and security, without getting in the way of the task of providing security. James snorted, “Perhaps we’ll get lucky and they’ll stumble over something.” John grinned, “Yes, and we both know what that will be.”
Intrasystem traffic tended to change as the planets orbited around the sun. Intersystem traffic didn’t much care where the various planets were, the ships just needed to get far enough away from their gravity wells that they could jump out. Ships with military grade drives could jump in or out much closer to a planet than civilian craft, but even they tended to avoid anything closer to the sun than the zone of life, or a rough globe midway between Venus and Earth. Even outside that zone, use of the jump system would constitute an emergency, and require a trip to the yards, should that be possible.
As a result, freighters would accelerate out of earth’s orbit and toward the system’s outer limits for as much as a week to ten days or even more before attempting to jump. Since the war, the government had established four moving corridors for intersystem transit. The hub was earth. The government also regulated the intrasystem traffic that moved from earth to Mars, which had a fairly large number of mining operations and scientific and research facilities.
All inhabited systems, and many that were explored but uninhabited, had been charted and the orbits of planets of interest recorded so that a ship wishing to enter that system would know the position of its destination before jumping in. This made it somewhat easier for system defenses, as traffic jumping in would tend to follow the planets orbit; that also meant that traffic that jumped in elsewhere would get increased attention.
Jupiter and its moons had gradually become a destination, one that was exploding in importance as the navy base on Ganymede progressed toward completion. Jupiter itself now supplied most of the oxygen and water used by the navy, and that appeared to be just the tip of hidden wealth in the Jovian system. Mercury was being explored and might one day be exploited for its treasure trove of heavy metals, but not for some time; all the other planets received some traffic, but only after obtaining specific permits which carried with them stiff fines for any failure to comply.
The war had changed earth in substantial ways. One of them had to do with nuclear weapons.
Earth’s people had, for generations, been raised on the evils of weapons of mass destruction. Every child watched ancient recordings of the aftermath of the second and third nuclear weapons to ever be fabricated; they even knew the names of those two weapons – Fat Man, and Little Boy. They were taught that once the god of war was released, it was virtually impossible to put back into the bottle, to mix at least two metaphors. That piece of wisdom was once again proving to be true.
Now, today, those generations of children, their teachers, and the descendants of those long-ago ages of war presumably looked on in horror from the next level of existence as earth’s military petitioned the federal government for permission to build nuclear tipped missiles. Evidence was presented showing that the rebels had deployed and used no less than thirty-eight nuclear missiles, one on a planetary surface, and thirty-seven in the battle for Fujian. Thirty-four had been destroyed, three had not, killing every living soul on three ships. The navy stated categorically that it could not guarantee that it could prevent a nuclear weapon from being introduced into earth’s shipping lanes. It didn’t need to fill in the blanks – everyone could guess what would happen should a nuclear weapon detonate on Earth’s surface.
Approval had been agonizing – and swift. Thorium was relatively common, and easier to acquire than uranium or plutonium, and numerous test weapons had already demonstrated its destructive potential. In an amazingly short period of time, five-megaton weapons that fit existing gravity drive missiles were developed and tested, and the navy was already taking delivery of the first batch of pre-production versions.
A few news reports publicly discussed the steps necessary to obtain the radioactive thorium, Th-90, which had to be processed into a usable form, Th-228 or Th-230; design, obtain approval and any necessary permits, and construct the facility or facilities to shape it into a bomb, and then construct large numbers of same. According to these reports, it would require far longer than the less than six months between the first report of the rebel use of a weapon, and the federal announcement of the first successful federal test. Federal authorities did not respond to enquiries, nor did the Navy.
John knew nothing of this, but of course, that would change.
Via Admiral Khan’s office, John was given sensor records on all shipping within the earth system, going back ten years. He called for Lt. Kilpatrick and discussed with her what he wanted. Her transfer seemed not to have mellowed her in the slightest, and she asked, “Sir, why have you chosen me for this task?” John found that she still irritated him. He answered, “Your previous superior assigned you to Ganymede, putting you in a position of responsibility at least two grades above your pay level. You were there for three months prior to my arrival. In that time you failed to screw up. I’m only guessing here, but I believe you were placed there in p
art due to your ability to severely piss off your superior officers, and in part because you appear to be shockingly good at your job. In other words, with one signature he got rid of an extremely irritating officer and solved a thorny personnel issue. I might also add that this is a combat command, full of enlisted and officers who are quite good at killing the enemy, but woefully inadequate at sitting at a desk or filling out the most basic paperwork, much less understanding it. In our first meeting, you demonstrated the ability to sit at your desk, and your subsequent effort on my behalf to determine why the hell I was sent your way demonstrated skill, possibly highly creative skill. Report back in one hour with any requirements you feel you may need, keeping in mind that we have virtually nothing on board this vessel that would be of any use to you. I’ll expect an initial analysis of traffic patterns by this time tomorrow. In addition, I require an analysis of potential targets that would cause the greatest actual damage, as well as those targets that would create the greatest social unrest, political upheaval, or a federal desire to sue for peace. I’d like to see your reasons for your top selections. Any other questions?”
For the very first time in John’s presence, she smiled, and stood up. She said, “No sir.”
She turned to leave his office, but turned back and said, utterly seriously, “Captain Chamberlin, thank you.” With that, she left. John looked at James and said, “She’s been in uniform for about one hour less than the war, she’s never served at a duty station longer than five months, and never received any promotions that didn’t involve a transfer. Care to guess why?” James grinned at his brother, “She was bored?” John said, “Yup.” James nodded, “You’ve just solved that little problem.”
Hawk Genesis: War (Flight of the Hawk) Page 33