Well-Traveled Rhodes (Kinsella Universe Book 6)

by Gina Marie Wylie

“One day the war will be over -- and I'm assuming that we prevail here -- and the Fleet will turn us all out to pasture.

  “I don't have a specific job that I can offer -- I'm merely a Fleet captain after all...”

  Admiral Gull sniffed in derision.

  “But, that said, back in civilian life I am the half owner of a very large company, and I was out here trying to spin off my very own company, instead of one founded by my great-, great- grandfather.

  “You are, to my way of thinking, Lieutenant, ideally suited as a project manager. You are a generalist -- you are someone who sees the big picture and doesn't get bogged down in details unless you must. When you have to get down to the detail level, you learn what you need to learn and then move on, not dwelling on the small things. In short, you are someone I could find a million things for you to do. Things that would make us both very wealthy, or, if you're like Stephanie Kinsella, very satisfied with just the sheer accomplishment of those projects.”

  Admiral Gull spoke up again, getting a glare from Captain Drake. “In the Fleet we call 'project managers' admirals.”

  Captain Drake nodded. “I suppose that's true. Admiral's know practically nothing about everything.”

  Admiral Gull laughed. “But, the reverse is true: we know something about very nearly everything.”

  He turned to Tam Farmer. “And of course, you're sitting there watching someone else getting a leg up on you, just like what happened to you at your bridge exam.”

  “Admiral, I'm good at what I do. I just want something to do.”

  “I know, and that's why you're here. You, Lieutenant, are not one to complain, no matter how much you were dumped on. You played by the rules, doing what you could to get your own back; that particular mushroom in BuPers not withstanding. You've made the best out of every situation you've found yourself in... and you didn't complain.”

  “What would have been the point, Admiral?”

  “None of course, as you so correctly realized. It is my belief, Lieutenant, that you are going to be an outstanding tactical commander. You play the hand you're dealt, you don't quit, and you have been looking for innovative ways to improve your situation.

  “And then, there's the fact that unlike most of the crew of the Pixie, you are my asset.” He grinned as he stressed the last pronoun. “So, when you return from deployment, you too will find yourself in the worry seat of a ship. Do a good job and you'll find that ship is a frigate. Do a spectacular job and who knows what sort of ship you'll command.”

  “And if I mess up?”

  “Have you ever messed up?” he shot back.

  “There's a first time for everything.”

  “That there is.

  “And now, it's time for me to turn into a small ogre,” he told Tam.

  “It was a small side bar in the general Fleet news that we received from Earth in the last few days. I don't want you to be alarmed if you read it, Lieutenant. Ganymede took two weapons strikes in the battle. Neither was anywhere close to the research station, I might add.

  “However, there is now some general surface contamination of long-lived isotopes. Fleet decided to recall the base personnel anyway, because while Ganymede is relatively intact, the Jovian system is not.

  “There were considerably more than a thousand weapons strikes on the big guy; while most of them were swallowed whole, with no discernible effects, some of those weapons detonated in the radiation belts. Huge quantities of charged particles are now flying around the Jovian system. It now takes an especially hardened vessel to close with it. How long this condition is going to remain, no one knows. They think they'll have a handle on it in a year or so, but in the meantime the lab has been evacuated. There were no casualties; your family is safe.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  He grinned and stood up. “Now, the two of you should return to your ship.” He turned to Captain Drake. “You shouldn't feel alone, Captain. I asked Master's Game about what Lieutenant Rhodes asked about and was told that I had even less need to know than you did.”

  They all laughed.

  A short while later they were in the shuttle, returning to Pixie. Tam reached out and touched Cindy's arm.

  “Please, would you listen for a moment?”

  “Of course, Tam.”

  “When I sat my bridge exam -- it hurt to see the special interest in those others. I'd gone to the Fleet Academy and busted my bottom getting to be number four in my class. Those people -- I knew Admiral Fletcher and those other officers weren't there to see me -- it was for those others... particularly Willow Wolf, even though I had no idea who she was until later.

  “One of the other officers who was there, he did well too, and he wasn't one of them, although I understand he later married Captain Wolf.”

  Cindy dredged a name from her memory. “John Montezuma.”

  “That was him,” Tam agreed. “Afterwards, he was as unsure as I was, but he'd been trying to date Willow Wolf -- evidently he succeeded.”

  “Evidently,” Cindy said, but she was uncertain where Tam was going.

  “And just now. Oh, they were sorry BuPers was messing with me and all of that, but we both know we had that dinner and concert because of you and not me.”

  “I wish I could say you're wrong,” Cindy said sadly, “but I can't.”

  “So, I have a request to make, XO. I'd like to move in with you.”

  Cindy sighed. “Tam, I'm not like that.”

  “Neither am I. But you are someone who is going places -- and if nothing else is true about what I've learned so far in the Fleet, if you hitch yourself to a rising star -- you rise too.”

  “It got Montezuma killed.”

  “XO, we're in a war. We could be killed in an instant by a malf; the aliens could attack in force two minutes from now. Life is a risk.”

  “Tam, honestly -- today I'm sixteen... you're what? Twenty-two?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you think you need to follow me around?”

  “I think I want to follow you around.”

  “We're back to 'I'm not like that.'”

  “XO, this isn't about that. It's about being one of those persons still standing when this is over and done with. Colinda Drake is one of the richest people in the Federation -- and she was offering to go partners with you.”

  “I'm not sure that's what she said.”

  “Oh, a lot of this and that,” Tam agreed. “But basically, she wants you working with her.”

  “Like I said, I'm not like that.”

  Tam rounded on her. “For God's sake, woman! Grow up! Not everyone wants to get in your panties! Some of us think you're going places and doing things! Important things! We want to share in it... not share you. I'm not into sharing, for what it's worth -- nor am I like that either.

  “A lot of officers and NCOs realize that they aren't that likely to go someplace on their own. They find someone who is, and then find a way to stick with them.”

  “And we would need to room together, in that case, why?” Cindy asked.

  Tam was silent for a few minutes, long enough for them to go to High Fan and return to normal space. “Honestly, I don't know.”

  “The Master Chief said something like what you just told me, once upon a time. We ended up deciding she'd make a better mother than a lover.” Cindy laughed. “Then she met Lieutenant McVey and the two of them have spent as much time in bed ever since as they can.

  “I'm not going to pretend I understand that sort of thing -- but I do like to think I know my own mind. It's not likely going to happen, do you understand?”

  “Not likely...” Cindy replied. “Please, Tam, don't lie to me. You don't want to room together to listen to me lecture about this, that or the other thing.”

  “No, I don't. I realized something at dinner a while ago.”

  “What?”

  “You've never had a friend.”

  Cindy started to say something and stopped. After a second, she cleared her throat an
d thought some more.

  “No, not really. There were people I knew in high school and we got along -- but we weren't friends. On Pixie -- you can't spend months in a ship the size of Pixie and not get to know everyone well. Chief Shinzu and Gunny Hodges -- they were the people I was most comfortable with. But... I'm not sure that I'd call them friends. Not even Shinzu and we roomed together.”

  “But you did room together, and she didn't try to seduce you and you didn't try to seduce her. You were friends of a sort, but I think there was too much baggage on both of your parts to get close.

  “You need to be able to let your hair down with someone. For me, it was Able Kearney, one of the lab techs on Ganymede. He was two years older than I was, but we had a lot of the same interests. We did almost everything together.” She chuckled. “My mother made sure I had my birth control shots current; no matter how many times I told her I didn't feel like that towards Able and he didn't feel like that towards me, she was sure we were more than friends.

  “Was she ever surprised when Able asked Joann Stamm to marry him!” Tam smiled slightly, “Although getting married did add some distance to our relationship, it wasn't until I went away to the Academy that Joann finally accepted the fact that we weren't secretly in love.”

  She laughed a bit. “For what it's worth, I knew all along that the one and only thing Able looked for when a met a new woman was her breasts. He liked his women sumptuous; it was like he was my older brother, not my boyfriend.”

  She waved vaguely forward. “You're planning something; I'm sure of it. But you don't even trust your own crewmates... that's just plain silly, Cindy. Who are we going to tell?”

  Cindy shrugged. “Captain Drake said something when we first met that struck me as odd, and I've been thinking about it ever since. She said one of the exercises she was going to run against Pixie was a boarding exercise -- to see how well we could defend ourselves, she said, at close quarters.

  “Gunny Hodges has been teaching us self defense on the trip out; he said yesterday he's going to redouble the training as soon as we deploy for this exercise.

  “But first, Captain Drake has to close with Pixie in a way that would be undetectable. She did it when we entered the system, but that won't work this time... still she has to have a plan. I think I know what it is... I'm trying to come up with a way to beat it.”

  Tam made a “come-along” gesture when Cindy stopped talking. “Look, XO, I'm not going to tell anyone what your plan is -- but do you honestly think it would hurt to have more than one brain thinking on it?”

  Cindy contemplated that. “During First Rome, they found that they could just cut loose a fighter from the carrier -- or another ship -- and if it wasn't under fans itself, it would return to normal space -- there wasn't even a gravity wave splash. The aliens couldn't detect such ships either.

  “I looked up the exercise area on the local database. There are five substantial asteroids in the area; I'm betting what we'll see is a ship that passes close to two of them on a course that ignores us.

  “I think it will be one of those Fargo-class pinnace ships, with Master's Game traveling with it. I checked; the pinnace turbines are large enough to drag Master's Game with one. I believe Master's Game will drop close to one of those rocks, with an intrinsic velocity that will allow them to close with it and dock with it.”

  “And then?” Tam asked.

  “Then they would need to do something to attract our attention, but not alarm us. I have no idea what.”

  “And the rapid transitions?”

  “I was wondering if there was something I could do -- with my not being subject to fan transitions as much most people. I've been asking Pixie a lot of questions -- usually she knows, but not always. I was surprised to learn that it takes 1725 nanoseconds for the signal to go from the computer to the engines to exit High Fan mode.

  “It takes five picoseconds for the current to stop flowing in the wires once the current is cut. Pixie takes that all into account in navigation calculations.”

  “Honestly, I knew the approximate order of magnitude of those numbers,” Tam told Cindy, “but the actuality is something only the navigators need to know in case the computer goes belly-up.”

  “Well, I was curious how fast the detectors work -- both gravity wave and fan detection. Pixie doesn't know how fast the actual transition from High to low fan takes, and doesn't know how long it is for the other way around. She does know that when you calculate the numbers she knows, she appears at the right spot in our universe... as though the transition takes no time at all and thus, by extension, the transition to High Fan also seems to take no time at all. She reports that it is possible to spread the transition out over some time -- but that a 'zero-cycle time’ transition is just that.”

  Tam nodded. “That's all pretty standard theory.”

  “But, what happens to things when you make very rapid zero-cycle time transitions? I mean, if you were to go off High Fan, wait a millisecond or two, then resume High Fan again for another millisecond or two, and then drop once again. Would the detectors show all of that? Or an average location?”

  “I have no idea. But three fan transitions in a fraction of a second -- that's going to hit most people pretty hard.”

  “Pixie doesn't know of any research on cycle times like that -- there has been a lot of research at zero-cycle time, and transitions a few minutes apart... but there is none that she knows of at time spans less than a minute.”

  “Human experimentation would likely be considered unethical. It's rare, but people die from fan transitions. If quick transitions make it worse, at a certain point the risk to volunteers would exceed acceptable -- I bet they wouldn't even do it with people who weren't affected as much.”

  Cindy nodded. “I was hoping we could get a shuttle assigned to Pixie on a permanent basis. Then, when we get to the exercise area, I could take it out and experiment.”

  “You'd never get permission,” Tam said bluntly. “The risk would be high -- even for you. In any case, what use would it be? If you tried something like that with Pixie...” She shivered dramatically. “It's just too dangerous for the rest of crew.”

  Cindy giggled. “I just had a thought. Our Blue missiles -- can they do that sort of thing?”

  “No, they aren't High Fan capable... they have no High Fan tracking hardware, either.”

  “It's my understanding that it wouldn't be that hard to make them High Fan capable.”

  Tam pursed her lips. “Probably it wouldn't take much, although it's likely to seriously cut down on the range.”

  “A shuttle though,” Cindy said. “It has the hardware and the High Fan capability.”

  “Except the engines have a governor. You can't go to High Fan for more than two minutes. They are meant for travel within a solar system and aren't designed for interstellar travel. They don't want someone taking off in one, anyway, so they limit what you can do in one.”

  “We'd need to modify the computer programming then,” Cindy said. “This keeps getting bigger and bigger.”

  “What are you trying to do?”

  “I want to know if we can use very rapid fan transitions to spoof a ship's location.”

  “Except that's too dangerous,” Tam reminded her.

  “It's circular logic,” Cindy said, sounding unhappy. “We can't try it because it's too dangerous -- and we can't find out if it's actually dangerous because we can't try it.”

  They docked at Pixie and Cindy shut things down.

  “On the Rim we call that a Catch-22, after a twentieth century novel. You can't obey Rule B because Rule A forbids it. You can't obey Rule A, because Rule B forbids it. Imagine if the rules were such that you had to be a lieutenant commander to take the bridge watchkeeping exam, but you couldn't take the exam unless you were a lieutenant commander.”

  “That doesn't make any sense.”

  “You'd be surprised how often they did things like that at the close of the twentieth and the start of
the twenty-first centuries.”

  They entered the ship and went to the bridge, where everyone was waiting for Cindy. There was a cake with candles and presents, and a good time for all. It helped to introduce the new crew members as well.

  Near the end of the party, Cindy pulled the captain to one side. “Tam tells me that I just couldn't ask Admiral Gull for some things I'd like, that I should go through you.”

  Lieutenant Hall grinned. “As I was told so many times before I became a captain -- no captain wants surprises. You need to run it past me; it gets problematical when your boss says no. Try me, Cindy.”

  “Well, my original thought was that I'd like to have a shuttle attached permanently to Pixie.”

  “We have one now,” Irene said with a grin.

  “We have one at our disposal while we're here. I mean, permanently. Now I'm thinking, I'd like two.”

  “One probably wouldn't be a problem,” the captain agreed. “Two will be a tougher sell.”

  “I want to modify one as if was a High Fan homing missile.”

  “There already is a project dedicated to just that.”

  “Well, I don't want to actually destroy anything with it; I just want to fool Captain Drake.”

  Cindy went on to explain her suspicions about the exercise.

  “I figured that myself. For the life of me, I didn't see how Master's Game could sneak up on us, unless they were there in advance, like the first time.”

  Cindy nodded. “I think this is a setup, Captain. I think they will be there in advance. Our enemies have in-system observers -- I think she put someone on one of those rocks. I think whoever is there, will, at the appropriate moment, send a signal or something that we would normally investigate. Master's Game will be hiding behind the rock and we'd walk into an ambush.”

  “I wonder if we could win if we simply didn't walk into the ambush?” the captain mused.

  Cindy shook her head. “I don't think so. It's going to be something we'd be required to investigate.”

  Captain Hall called Tin Tin over and explained; that led to Lieutenant McVae being called, which brought along Chief Shinzu. It seemed as if in no time everyone on the crew was brainstorming the problems.