Well-Traveled Rhodes (Kinsella Universe Book 6)

by Gina Marie Wylie

  “And that, Cindy, suits me just fine!”

  “Aye, aye, Captain!”

  *** ** ***

  Two days later Tin Tin Roeser gave them his presentation on his analysis of the Big Battle. It was easily the most stunning thing that Cindy had experienced to date in the Fleet, and considering how often she'd been surprised, that was saying something.

  “Our enemies are either schizos or they don't talk to each other very much.

  “First Rome had to have alerted them to the fact that we could detect them on High Fan. The Picket Force should have alerted them to the fact. At New Cairo, one of the ship captains there, pursued by an alien warship, failed to drop from High Fan as he was ordered to, and continued on, exiting the area, and eventually evading the pursuit.

  “Over and over again, we've used our detectors to defend our worlds. Yet, the main force of the enemy came in stupid against Earth, clearly unaware we'd been shadowing them.

  “At Earth, only a corporal's guard of their ships had High Fan homing missiles. Some of their ships clearly knew they had to vary accelerations and make frequent course changes to avoid Blues -- but the majority of their attacking ships didn't know that one simple thing that would have protected them.

  “There were smaller anomalies. During First Rome, Hannah Sawyer showed us how to shake off their High Fan seeker missiles. At Earth about a third of their seeker missiles had been programmed to deal with that, and, for the most part, destroyed their targets. The rest were like their fleet -- they came in dumb, and sharp pilots could beat them.

  “It’s been eighteen months since First Rome; either their communications are screwed up by distance or language.

  “The aliens that showed the most sophistication were clearly in the minority; an overwhelming minority.

  “The conclusions I will now draw from this are almost certainly wrong -- but they do explain the observed facts.

  “It is my belief that the aliens actually occupy a relatively few systems, and that those systems are at a considerable remove from each other. On the order of a hundred or more light years apart and perhaps more than that.

  “It is my further belief, that we've now encountered three groups of these aliens; the vast majority of the ships we faced in this attack came from the newest member of our attackers to face us -- ships that had not been modified or even notified of our weapons and tactics.”

  “Three groups, Tin Tin?” Captain Hall asked.

  “Yes. The first group conducted the early attacks on the Federation; it's possible there were some elements from a second group. I think that while those attacks were ongoing, allies of some sort, from a further remove, were brought up to defend the nearest outposts of their species.

  “The third group provided the bulk of the forces that attacked Earth.

  “In summary: our enemies do not appear to be at the same technological levels and they don't appear to be willing to share information with each other -- or if they do, the transmission of that information is slow.

  “If I'm right, this mission, while important might possibly discover at the most, one alien major planet, but more likely not. Worse, the next major enemy system may be more than a hundred light years further distant, and a third another couple of hundred light years further on. All distances are wild guesses.”

  They spent hours discussing Tin Tin's ideas, but no one had any better insight.

  Then it was back to the books for Cindy; math, more math and still more math. She went as far as she could in the other subjects but the lack of a sufficient math background was crippling.

  Slowly, resolutely, she stuck with it, counting her triumphs in concepts and methods learned.

  Shinzu was there for her every time Cindy felt down, quietly supportive, never pushing, content in sharing small victories and milestones reached.

  “How do you put up with me?” Cindy asked her friend two weeks from Adobe.

  “I know you think I know everything; I don't. When I was your age, I had a mental block about electronics; I simply didn't understand it. That was the first exposure I really had to applied mathematics. Good ol' square root of minus 1! What can be more irrational than that?”

  Cindy smiled wanly. “You're confusing imaginary with irrational!”

  “You'd think so! It took me forever to reach an understanding of how the math worked. One of my instructors sat me down at a fluid flow apparatus and made me run hundreds of flow experiments. When I got the basics down, he added some iron filings and magnetic fields -- and I faced my personal demon and beat it up. The square root of minus one is intractable to conventional math -- but its square is dead cert simple. Minus one! One day I looked down on a circuit and saw how it worked. One glance was all it took!”

  “Thank you, Shinzu,” Cindy said sincerely.

  “Want to go to bed?”

  Cindy knew that was more than the simple offer it sounded like. “I want to spend a bit longer studying.”

  Shinzu squeezed Cindy's shoulder and a moment later was softly snoring on her bunk.

  Cindy sighed after a bit, staring at the older woman. She didn't think Shinzu would be happy if she knew Cindy thought of her as the mother she'd wished she had. Cindy was still staring into infinity when Shinzu shook her.

  “You have watch soon,” she told Cindy. She looked into Cindy's eyes. “You're upset.”

  “I don't know which way is up any more, Shinzu. God, I don't know.”

  “Tell me what you know or think you know.”

  Cindy buried her face on the older woman's shipsuit.

  Shinzu stroked Cindy's hair for a few minutes. “Time is getting short, Cindy.”

  “Shinzu... I don't know what to say.”

  “Say what you think, Cindy.”

  “I wish you were my mother.”

  Shinzu laughed. “Cindy, it took me nearly this long to realize that I wish you were my daughter. There is no hope for us as lovers.”

  “I do love you.”

  “And I love you, but -- differently -- than I thought before.”

  “What are we to do?”

  “Why, I'll be your mother, silly girl! If you don't hustle to relieve the watch on time, I'll paddle you!”

  Cindy tarried another second. “Thank you for understanding.”

  “I'll thank you not to be late relieving the watch!”

  Still, Shinzu was laughing, so Cindy rushed... arriving as expected, five minutes early.

  Chapter 9 -- Adobe

  Three days before they were to reach Adobe, Cindy was sleeping when an alert tone sounded. “All hands, report to the bridge.”

  It was day watch and Captain Hall was doing the asking. It didn't seem critically important, so Cindy wasn't particularly concerned.

  “A short while ago, we detected another ship on High Fan, ahead of us, inbound towards Adobe. It is moving slightly slower than we are, but will still arrive about five hours ahead of us.”

  Tin Tin chuckled. “There has to be something else.”

  “Our detectors are good out to three light months. That ship wasn't there one second, and then it was... only at 90 light days, not 91. They were waiting and saw us coming, and then went to fans.”

  Tin Tin sat at his position and started reviewing data, while the rest of them went to their stations as well. Cindy was frustrated, as usual. Everyone else seemed to be busy with something; she had nothing to do, and for the life of her, she couldn't think of one thing she should be checking that someone else wouldn't already be looking at.

  She started to feel the same frustration she'd felt in the Big Battle. She was useless, good only for sitting on the sidelines. She hardened her heart. This time she wasn't going to cry; instead she racked her brain, trying to think of something, anything she was qualified to do.

  Relief came from an unexpected source. Her link to the ship activated. “Ensign Rhodes, unless I miss my guess you don't have much on your plate at the moment,” Tin Tin Roeser commented.

  “Yo
u need anyone fired; I can do that.”

  He laughed in her head. “No, not that. Let me explain the odds here. There is about a forty percent chance that the ship is as innocent and pure as the driven snow. While I've never met Colinda Drake, I've heard about her most of my professional life. She's a genius with computers, and not a half bad Fleet captain. So, I estimate there is also about a forty percent chance that she's messing with us. That she's got a little exercise in mind, wanting to see how we react; probably something to do with our mission.

  “That said, there is a not insubstantial possibility that the aliens have destroyed Adobe and are lying in wait to kill inbound ships. They do like their pickets!

  “I realize you aren't a skilled navigator, but you do have an unconventional approach to problem solving. I would like to see if you could find a way to approach Adobe in such a way that they won't know where we are.”

  “That ship can already detect us.”

  “That's so. But at some point we'll come off High Fan. It would be nice to do that somewhere where they can't immediately find us. Please, give it some thought.”

  “Yes, Tin Tin.” She'd been told a hundred times that he was “Tin Tin” and not sir -- that they were both ensigns. He'd threatened one of the junior chiefs with having to write it out longhand “Ensign Roeser is an Ensign of the Fleet. With supervision, he can put on his shipsuit almost as well as anyone else.” Captain Hall had told him that he needed a shorter message, but the fact remained that it was hard to think of someone as old as he was as “just another ensign.”

  So, Cindy turned to the problem. She knew enough about navigation these days to display possible courses on the computer display; calculate orbits? Hah! Not!

  Still, one thing the basic certificates emphasized was that while you can't trust a computer a hundred percent, mostly they were your friends. If you gave them something simple and straight forward to deal with, they were far more likely than not to give the right answer.

  She pulled up their course; the one that the captain had plotted for them. The orientation of star systems was random: that is, there was no preferred orientation that they rotated in. Ship orbits had certain elements that had to be factored in when calculating courses.

  Ships had a base course and an intrinsic velocity when they went to High Fan. That basic course was the one they followed on High Fan. If you were on course X, Y, and Z, and you wanted to go to a star at A, B, and C, you had to reorient, so your vector was pointed at the new destination. As a result most ships traveled with relatively low intrinsic velocities if they could. The navigator would take into account the intrinsic of their origin, the intrinsic of their destination and try to make the origin's look more like the destination's before their ship arrived. Frequently ships spent more time matching intrinsic velocities than would have been needed to just go where they wanted to go.

  Because star systems had random orientations, a few systems were edge-on to Earth, a few looked like giant bulls-eyes -- but most were inclined to some degree.

  Had Pixie gone as originally planned, they would have arrived at Adobe system south, with an orbit only slightly inclined from Adobe's. However, Bridges had been a bulls-eye. They'd had to rather completely reorient, and now they were approaching Adobe with a far higher orbital inclination than they'd had to begin with.

  Before, they would never have come close to Adobe's star; they still didn't, but if she extended Pixie's course, it passed through the system's asteroid belt. The problem with that was Pixie was traveling at twelve kilometers a second and the asteroids they would pass through were moving at eighteen kilometers per second, on average.

  “Tin Tin,” she spoke into her comm link.

  “Yes, Cindy?”

  “I'm stupid. I know Pixie has a way to change our velocity vector without fans, but I don't know how much or how fast.”

  “It's not that I'm not going to tell you, but there are pointy-headed officers not half as understanding as I am who'd down check you for asking them instead of Pixie. We have what are called 'burner cans.' Those are classic rocket engines that use our deuterium fuel as a working fluid. That is, I mean, it really sucks up the go juice!

  “How much delta v do you need?”

  “Six kilometers per second.”

  “Work backwards. A standard gravity is what?”

  “Ten meters a second.”

  “Right! And that is how many kilometers per second?”

  Cindy grimaced, but asked Pixie, knowing she'd be dinged if it took any time at all to calculate. “A hundredth of a standard gravity makes that a hundredth of a kilometer per second.”

  “We could change those six kilometers a second in just six seconds at a hundred gravities, then. It would be... uncomfortable. How many gravities would we take over six minutes to get the same delta v?”

  Cindy's brow furrowed. “This doesn't seem right. A third of a g.”

  “You're trying to do it in your head. In this, you can trust the computer, Cindy.”

  A hundred seconds at one gravity would change the ship's velocity a kilometer a second. Six minutes was 360 seconds, or 3.6 kilometers per second... more than half of what was needed. So, it would be more like one and a half gravities for six minutes. That wouldn't be, she thought, that uncomfortable.

  Chief Shinzu's voice intruded. “Cindy, I swear to you, if you don't use the computer to get accurate numbers right this second, I'm going to put you over my knee, right there on the bridge, pull down your britches and paddle you.”

  Cindy stood her ground. “Master Chief, I was told that one of my educational goals was to be able to compute rough approximations without computer assistance. This is, so I was told, an exercise. I am trying to exercise my skills.”

  “She got you there, Shinzu!” she heard Tin Tin say.

  The captain spoke up. “Two things to contemplate, Ensign. What is our current fuel state, what would the proposed time on burner cans do to that... but, most important of all... just where do you think we should end up?”

  They were at thirty-eight percent of their fuel state; quite good, considering how far they'd come. It wasn't enough to get them home again, but they could reach any number of bases in the Federation.

  She looked at the fuel consumption numbers and grimaced. One minute at five gravities was one percent of their fuel. On the other hand, that would do the trick. She started a search on the asteroids they would be close to.

  Two were large; much larger than usual. One of them even had something like an atmosphere. One by one, she checked the top hundred, sorted by size.

  She told Pixie her final choices: four point eight gravities for sixty-eight seconds, then a few tiny bursts on their thrusters to dock with number fifty-eight.

  Gunny Hodges spoke on the circuit. “Now ain't that sweet! Master Chief; were you to try to spank Ensign Rhodes, I'm afraid I'd feel obliged to intervene.”

  For an instant Cindy heard Shinzu's voice in her head, secure, she was told, from being overheard. “Daughter! I am so proud of you I could burst!”

  A few minutes later Captain Hall was explaining their planned approach.

  “I can't stress enough that this may be an exercise; so -- be careful! At the same time this could be an attempt to lull us into a trap. You will have to be on your toes!”

  When they were three light months from the Adobe system the unknown ship ahead of them didn't vary or swerve -- it kept on going. It had slowly lost ground, ending up eighty-seven light days ahead of them. It passed part way through the Adobe system -- and then dropped abruptly from High Fan near a gas giant. There should have been no way for them to detect the ship if it had shut its fans down after that... but instead it kept its fans running at levels high enough to detect Pixie.

  They had, by then, discovered something disquieting -- the Adobe system was quiet. They could detect no ships under fan; they were too far away to get the system sensor reports, but the fact that there were no fan sources visible was a concern.
>
  Everyone noticeably sharpened, including Cindy. When they were an hour away, everyone was looking for anything at all about the system that could tell them what was going on. Tin Tin was adamant: they had to plan on the possibility that Adobe was conducting an exercise with them the target, but that didn't mean that that was what was happening. They would have to be extra alert.

  Irene Hall had long since made the final decision: they passed their expected arrival point without stopping, and continued on into the system. Minutes later they were all braced for when Pixie dropped from High Fan and went to her burner cans.

  For Cindy five gravities was far worse than a dozen fan transitions, but she knew her crewmates would have to endure it if they had to. She shut her mouth and endured.

  Tin Tin was ecstatic. “We slid into position with the nicest burn you could imagine. Unless they had their eyes on us when we were making the burn, they won't have a clue where we are!”

  Two hours passed and Shinzu appeared next to Cindy. “Your shit doesn't stink; so what? Do you have a plan for now? A way we could hurt them if there really are aliens in control of the system?”

  Cindy laughed. “I was asked to do something; I did it. Are you asking me for something more?”

  “There is always something more.”

  “Well, the last I heard, our job was to observe and report. What say we stay here a full day, then push off and go back to High Fan again, heading back towards the Federation? We came, we saw -- we could be heading home with our intelligence.”

  “There is no intelligence.”

  Tin Tin was sitting a few feet away and he smiled broadly. “Master Chief, with respect, the lack of intelligence can be almost as revealing as anything else. Ensign Rhodes is right, although I bet we don't have to wait that day. I'm pretty sure this is an exercise. The ship we followed into the system and latch-frame is up and running -- we're just not receiving anything.”