He considered the tactical situation, or considered it as best he could since his task force was twelve lightminutes away from the planet, and the last reported position of the two enemy destroyers was currently another lightminute and a half beyond the planet. For all Kekrando knew, the enemy had detected his small, stealthed task force and had just jumped in a lightsecond away to launch missiles at him. The sensor time-lag aspect of space warfare was frustrating and confusing to many ship captains, and some prospective officers were never able to deal with the inevitable uncertainty about sensor data. Kekrando had been fortunate to have both a generally fatalistic outlook on life, and a skilled training officer who had helped Kekrando understand the difference between aggressive action and macho stupidity.
“Tiekum,” he addressed the remark to the ship’s executive officer without looking at the man. “Instruct the galley to prepare the evening meal early, and to make it something special. After we dine, we will clear the ship for action and go to general quarters.”
“Sir?” Tiekum was astonished. “You propose to hold us to the schedule? The enemy ships are out of position and we can’t be certain of engaging them with any-”
“Tiekum,” this time Kekrando did turn to regard the man. Most of the crew in his little task force, like the ships themselves, were second-hand castoffs, assets no one else in the clan wanted. Three of the ships had even been lent by a rival clan, an indication of how concerned Kristang leadership was about nipping the idea of the Verd-Kris joining an ‘Alien Legion’. Kekrando’s own people had gone over the two borrowed ships stem to stern with a fine-toothed comb, looking for equipment that could be used to double-cross Kekrando’s clan. They had not found any, making Kekrando waver between optimism the ships might have been offered as a sincere and rare gesture of interclan cooperation, and worry that his unskilled crews simply had not known what to look for. His other worry was that the two ships were manned by their home clan and Kekrando was still working out issues of command and control in coordinating task force maneuvers. The ship’s XO was another asset Kekrando did not yet have the measure of, the crew often seemed derisive, even insubordinate to Tiekum, but the man appeared to be competent and level-headed. Perhaps all he needed was coaching and for the crew to see Kekrando placing his confidence in the unfamiliar XO. “The enemy has spoiled our plans, that is for certain, and it shows Commodore Sequent is not a sporting gentleman at all. Do you wish me to file a formal protest with the enemy?”
The executive officer’s throat became suddenly deathly dry. For a ship captain to speak so disdainfully in front of the crew was usually prelude to demotion, punishment or even a laser bolt between the eyes. “Cap- Senior Captain, I only meant-” His stammer ground to a halt as, to his utter amazement, he saw a twinkle in Kekrando’s eyes! The storied commander had been jesting! “Oh, er, no, Sir. As your opponent is clearly not any kind of a gentleman, he could not be trusted to take a protest with proper seriousness.” Then Tiekum took the greatest risk of his career; he winked at Kekrando.
The admiral threw his head back and roared with laughter, causing the bridge crew to freeze, not having any idea what to do with the novelty of a jovial commander. “Tiekum, you may yet command a ship of your own. Yes, we will keep to the accelerated schedule. We have no choice, as we are here only to support our ground forces.”
“Captain,” Tiekum added nervously, not knowing how far the new familiarity with Kekrando extended. “We do not have sufficient numbers to engage enemy ground forces, and also pursue Sequent’s two destroyers.”
“Your assessment is correct, Tiekum. Therefore, we will not pursue those destroyers. We will make them come to us. Shall I show you my plan, for your education? And so you can execute my instructions, if my death is untimely?” Kekrando’s eyes darted around the bridge, suspecting one or more of the senior crew had orders to watch him and, if needed, terminate his service to the clan.
“If you please, Commodore, I would be honored to learn.”
Shauna turned to the left to peer at the screen of her second laptop, her eyes going back and forth between the two machines in front of her. She was tired and as she moved her head quickly to pivot between the displays, her ponytail swung and swished against her collar. Tired and irritated, she exhaled a gasp of exasperation and reached back to tug the ponytail out of its rubber band, quickly retying it to hang in front over her right shoulder where it was not in her way. Clicking between feeds from sensor drones, she narrowed her search. Again. So far, despite the long day and intense effort, she had nothing to show Colonel Perkins.
Jesse swung the tent flap aside with one foot, carrying two cups of coffee. He opened his mouth to say something clever to cheer up his girlfriend, then went quiet when he saw her hair was hanging to the side. When on duty, Shauna always kept her hair tied up in a ponytail, a no-nonsense bun, or she used pins to keep it flattened against the back of her head in some complicated braid thing that Jesse had been firmly instructed not to touch.
Seeing her hair down, or swept to the side in a graceful arc, was for Jesse Colter like waving a cape at a bull. He set down his cup of coffee on a cabinet. “Hello, darlin’,” he said as he offered her the other cup, then put it on the table safely away from the keyboards when she waved the beverage away. “No coffee?”
Shauna barely looked up as she pointed to the pile of discarded coffee cups behind the laptop displays. “I drank too much already.”
Perhaps Jesse was not skilled at picking up cues, verbal or nonverbal. Or perhaps he was just thinking with the wrong head. Why he did a dumb thing was less important than the fact that he did a dumb thing. At first, he used his fingertips to gently massage her neck and shoulders, knowing she held tension there, especially after a long day staring at displays.
Shauna moaned softly, not realizing what she was doing and encouraging her boyfriend. Jesse, priding himself on being no fool, kept going with light pressure from his fingertips until her shoulders relaxed ever so slightly. He then switched to tracing the sides of her neck up to behind her neck. Shauna wriggled her shoulders which should have been a solid clue except Jesse’s brain was not in ‘Receive’ mode and he bent down to kiss her neck.
“Ah!” Shauna squealed at feeling unexpected wetness on her neck. One hand flew back instinctively, catching Jesse on the nose and making him jump back.
Holding his sore nose and bending it slightly to make sure the cartilage was not broken, he spat on the dirt floor. “What the hell did you do that for?”
“Sorry,” she glanced back at him before returning her attention to her work. “I’m busy, Jesse. This is not ‘fun time’.”
Still hoping to salvage the situation, he blinked away tears of pain and let go of his injured nose. A little discomfort was not going to stop him. “Come on, darlin’, you’ve been at this all day. Take a break,” he tugged playfully on her ponytail and used the hair to tickle her neck. “This stuff will still be here in the morning.”
“Jesse Colter,” she turned to face him, slapping his hand away and glaring. “Either you respect me as a soldier and respect my work, or you think I am just a piece of tail for you to bang whenever you want.”
“Well,” Jesse gave his most charming smile in one last desperate attempt. “Not whenever.”
Shauna didn’t say anything, she didn’t need to. The needle of Jesse’s panic meter pegged on MAXIMUM DUMBFUCK and bent, straining to indicate a previously unexplored level of dumbfuckery. Fortunately for Jesse, Mama Colter didn’t raise no fool. He straightened, threw back his shoulders and put on his All Business. “Show me what you got, Sergeant Jarrett.”
“Really?” She gave him the side-eye until Jesse retrieved his own coffee cup, took a big swig and sat down at the pair of laptops on the table opposite her.
“If this is important to you, it’s important to us. If you think it’s important enough to stay up late, then it must be important to the Legion. So, Sergeant,” he took a breath. “What you got?”
; Shauna sighed, looked at her own coffee cup and took a sip, sticking out her lower lip at the bitter brew. “It would take too long to explain.”
“You didn’t just insult my learnin’ ability, did you?”
“No! No, it’s, it’s just, this is complicated.”
“It’s not that complicated.” He picked up a chair and dragged it over to sit beside her. “Show me.”
Twenty minutes later, having drained his coffee cup and half of hers, Jesse admitted it was complicated. Unless you ignored all the extraneous bullshit and focused narrowly on what they were trying to achieve: finding evidence of Kristang caches of weapons or troops in areas supposedly cleared and under control of the Legion.
“Here’s what I don’t understand,” Jesse stared straight ahead at the display while gauging Shauna’s reaction. “We are not concerned about small groups behind the lines, a squad here and there.”
“We are concerned,” his fellow sergeant corrected him.
“Right. We’re not as concerned. We’re not going through all this,” he jabbed a finger at the laptop, “to find a few pesky lizards. The Commish is-”
“The Commish?”
“Commissioner Useless, you know what I mean. He is worried about big groups of the enemy behind our lines.”
“He is worried, and the Colonel is worried. So, I’m worried too.”
“Even a company-size asshole of lizards could-”
“Asshole?”
“That’s what you call a group of lizard warrior caste. Like how a group of crows is called a ‘murder’. Ski told me that.”
“Asshole,” Shauna’s shoulders shook. “That’s the first time I’ve had a laugh all day.”
It was Jesse’s turn to stick to business, because he was on a roll. “Focus, darlin’, just a while longer. I see all these areas are marked ‘Clear’. That means, what?”
“It means those areas behind the lines have been checked again by deep-scanning sensor drones, and they found,” she yawned, “nothing.”
“I got that. What about these yellow areas here? They’re behind our lines, too. I can see sensor drones and aircraft have flown over the sites, and ground patrols have been there. Why are they in yellow?”
“Because deep sensor scans aren’t reliable there. Those are fusion power plants, generating power for cities or industries that draw too much power for solar.”
“So, there could be a whole lot of lizards hidden under a fusion plant, and we’re not looking there because,” his eyes bulged with astonishment, “it’s too hard?”
“No. Yes. We’re not looking there because it’s a waste of time. If there are lizards under those plants, hidden in a stealth field, we won’t find them with our scanning equipment.”
“The lizards know that, they’re not stupid. The one best place they could hide a whole brigade, we’re not looking? Darlin’, my namesake Jesse James was once asked why he robbed banks, and he said because that’s where the money is.”
“The question meant,” Shauna wearily brushed hair away from her face, “why did he rob banks, instead of earning an honest living?”
“I like my version better. The point is, we should be looking for trouble in the places trouble would hide, if they’re not completely stupid.”
“Fine,” Shauna yawned again. “You got any idea how to do that? The hamster sensor gear we have access to says it can’t be done, unless we get shovels and dig under a fusion reactor.”
Jesse shrugged. “I don’t know. Let me think on it while I get more coffee.”
“None for me, thanks.”
Jesse walked through the door flap and down the hallway to the break room, also just a section of tent partitioned off by hanging panels. Somebody had just made a fresh pot of coffee, he had to wait while it finished dripping. When he lifted the pot to pour the fresh brew into his cup, he jostled the pot and spilled a couple hot drops on his hand. “Ow!” He carefully set down both pot and cup, sucking on the scalded area with his mouth to soothe it. “Damn, that coffee is hot,” he muttered, and stood bolt upright.
Forgetting the cup of coffee, he strode back to Shauna, who was slumped with her head cradled in one hand. “Wake up, Sergeant. I got a question for you. People and equipment underground have got to generate heat, right?” He scratched his head. “I remember going to Florida when I was a kid. It was chilly one morning, and my parents took me to a powerplant near a river. In the pond where the cooling water discharges, there were floating a whole flock of manatees, because they don’t like cold water.”
“I think a group of manatees is called a ‘herd’,” Shauna wrinkled her forehead in thought. “Maybe a ‘pod’.”
“Whatever. My point is, that fusion plant generates heat. For cooling, it takes in water from the river through these pipes upstream,” he tapped the display. “And dumps the warm water out downstream here.”
“Yeah, so?” Shauna was too tired to think clearly. “Every powerplant does that.”
“So, we know how much heat those fusion reactors should be generating. Or there must be some way to know that, right? I read somewhere those fusion bottles are a standard Kristang design. Their age, how much power they output and the local climate have got to affect how much heat they generate, but the hamsters must have a way to calculate that. They are smart little rodents,” he grinned.
“Sure.” She rubbed her eyes. “You want to see if any powerplant is generating more waste heat than it should? You figure that extra heat is from cooling a group of lizards hidden underground?”
“Lizards and whatever equipment they have down there.” He picked up a laptop and held the bottom in his palm, feeling the warmth. “Equipment gives off all kinds of heat.”
“We can try,” she pursed her lips, fingers hovering over a keyboard. “The hamsters won’t want to give us that data, we embarrassed them enough already.”
“This ain’t about us taking credit,” Jesse said quietly, knowing is was at least a little bit about taking credit. “We tell the hamsters and they take it from there.”
“The Ruhar aren’t going to listen to us. Not even the Colonel either.”
“All righty then. We get our Verd friends to request the data. Tell them, um, we’re trying to see if power is being diverted from the plants, something like that.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Shauna had just dropped off to sleep when the zPhone under the cot buzzed. “Ungh,” Jesse mumbled next to her. “What’n hell is that?”
“My phone. Or yours,” she rolled over, untangling herself from Jesse’s right arm and reaching on the floor for a phone. The first one her fingers found, of course, was not the one buzzing. When she touched the vibrating object, it slipped away. “Ah, shit,” she flopped over the edge of the cot, swinging her legs back and smacking Jesse in the head.
“Ow!” He held onto her foot to prevent further damage.
Shauna grunted with the effort of reaching under the cot, telling herself it would have been easier to simply get out of bed, but doing that would have committed her to shaking the cobwebs out of her head and being awake, and she had just drifted off to sleep. No. That couldn’t be right, the stupid phone was saying she had been asleep for nearly four hours? “Hello?” She answered, her dry and bleary eyes not able to read the caller ID.
It was Perkins. “Jarrett, I just got a call from our Verd friends. You requested a data set from them?”
“Ma’am?” Shauna stifled a yawn.
“Data,” Perkins repeated patiently.
There was some mumbled talk in the background, a voice Shauna recognized as Dave Czajka, and hearing that made Shauna smile, sit up and reach back for Jesse with her other hand. He caressed her hand and tugged gently on her hair until she shook her head, tucked the phone to her shoulder and silently mouthed ‘Perkins’. Despite the dim lighting in the tent, Jesse got the message. “I’m sorry, Ma’am, what data? Oh!” Awareness dawned on her. “About the fusion plants.”
“What is going on, Sergeant?
The Verds are happy to provide the info, but they want in on whatever you’re doing. What are you doing?”
Shauna knew the colonel and her officially-not-a-soldier lover were in another partition of the tent only twenty feet away. “Meet us in the war room, Colonel?”
“Excess heat output, hmm?” Emily yawned as she distractedly tied her hair up in a bun, snapping a rubber band to keep it in place. She could feel the bun was a frazzled mess and hair was sticking out all over and she didn’t care. She also knew that Dave Czajka considered her messy just-got-out-of-bed hair to be very attractive and she did care about that, she also had not enough time to do anything about it at the moment. “It’s a longshot, but, good thinking, Jarrett.”
“It was Jesse’s idea,” Shauna stated as she sat and began pulling up the data from the Verds.
“Colter?” Perkins flashed a thumbs up at the other sergeant while she looked over Shauna’s shoulder. “Good thinking and good teamwork.”
“It may be nothing, Ma’am,” Jesse downplayed the idea, not wanting to get their CO’s hopes up.
Ten minutes later, with Shauna using one laptop and Perkins on the other, they had examined all the data and found three candidates. “Four percent, seven and eight,” Shauna bit her lower lip. Of the seven major fusion power plants on Fresno, they had found only three that were generating a suspicious amount of excess heat.
“Four percent is in the margin of error,” Perkins observed. “We can ignore that one.”
“I’m not sure about that,” Dave tapped her laptop display and set a full cup of coffee on the table. “That fusion plant is the oldest one on the planet, and we know the lizards have had problems with coolant pipes cracking,” he flipped the file to a report from the Ruhar colony prep contractor Glabosor. That company’s engineers had reviewed historical data that was surrendered grudgingly by the Kristang, or hacked from data systems that had less than military-grade security. The day-to-day operations of power-generating facilities were not considered a big secret. “Between the fusion plant and the river is a big marsh. If the outlet pipes are cracked, a lot of waste heat could be leaking into the marsh, and we wouldn’t see excess heat downstream from the outlet pipes. So, the real number could be a lot higher than four percent.”
Deathtrap Page 21
