With that, I motioned to the assault troopers. As a group, we moved past blocking marines, who stepped aside, and we climbed back into the 747.
I’d hardly picked a seat when a red-suited security man climbed up the ladder and poked his head inside the plane.
“Commander Creed,” the man said, “I have a communicator.” He held it up. “The Prime Minister is on the line.”
“Pitch it here, son.”
The man only hesitated a second, tossing the hand-communicator to me. Afterward, he departed.
I looked at the little device and could see an upset Diana looking out of the screen at me.
“Hello, love,” I said.
“Creed,” Diana said. “This time you’ve gone too far. Kidnapping the Police Proconsul is a traitorous offense against the government of—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down. A horde of space marines charged us as we got off the plane. They came with guns loaded, surrounding us as if we were criminals. Then your pet policeman starts making demands.” I shook my head. “We’ve never dealt with each other like that before. What’s going on?”
“Release the Police Proconsul this instant,” Diana said, angrily.
“Sure,” I said. Turning around, I pointed at Spencer sitting in a seat. “He’s out of here.”
“We’re just letting him go?” Rollo asked, seeming crestfallen.
“Yep. The Prime Minister has given the word, and she’s in charge.”
Rollo eyed me, shrugged, put a hand on Spencer’s right shoulder and practically flung him up onto his feet.
“Git,” Rollo said.
Spencer glanced at the mountain of a man, dusted off his shoulder, glanced at me and left with as much dignity as he could muster.
After he walked off the plane, I told Diana, “He’s out, heading down to the hovers.”
“Now,” she said. “I demand that you come into town.”
“No problem.”
“Alone,” she added.
“Now, there’s a problem.”
“Ah,” Diana said. “So Spencer was correct.”
“About what?”
“That you’ve been plotting—”
“Hey, Prime Minister, do you want me to get those six cruisers for you or not?”
“Will you threaten Earth with them?”
I said nothing, merely stared at her.
“Come alone, Creed,” she said. “Convince me you’ve been acting in good faith.”
“I didn’t have to come to Earth,” I told her. “Without me, humanity was toast. Either the Lokhars or the Plutonians will burn down our planet. Why are you all of a sudden having second thoughts about me?”
“You’re not following the line of authority, Creed. You’re up to your old tricks, running things how you see fit.”
“Yeah, so what else is new?”
“I’m the legal authority of Earth.”
“No question there.”
“That means you’ll do exactly as I tell you.”
“Nope,” I said. “I will not. Diana, it looks to me as if you have to decide. If you want to try to castrate me so I can’t do my job, then I’m going to walk.”
“You’ll leave?”
“On the next plane out,” I said.
She stared at me through the small screen. “I demand that you take—”
“Listen,” I said, interrupting her. “I’m leaving to get the Lokhar cruisers. I’m not going to fly them to Acheron with fifty people. I need regular military along for that. I’m going to need thousands of personnel, some ship people and some space marines.”
“What’s your point?” Diana asked.
“You can send who you want when we try for Acheron.”
“What if I demand that you take Spencer with you?”
“If you want to try to run Earth without him,” I said, “sure. Why not?”
“Do you mean that?”
“I give you my word.”
Diana said nothing.
“Think about it,” I said. “Am I acting any differently than from the past?”
“No…”
“Did I try to depose you back then?”
“No,” she said more softly.
“Then, why would I bother now? I’ve never wanted to run the whole shebang, well, except at the beginning when I had to. Look. I’m a warrior. I’m not sure if I’m even a soldier. But I like to fight, especially against those who screw with those I love.”
Her shoulders deflated. “I overreacted,” she said, softly.
I shrugged. “Holding onto power is hard, making you paranoid. I think we’re ready, at least given our timetable. Have your people had any luck locating the Ambassador’s cruisers?”
“No.”
“Do you mind having them send me a list of the places where the cruisers were not?”
“Where should I send that?”
“I’ll call back and give you a number.”
“How long will it take you to reach Acheron?”
“First,” I said, “we have to find and capture the cruisers. But the short answer is, as fast as we can.”
-31-
I had several overriding problems, almost all of them related to lack of time. The kicker was, when would the next Plutonian attack come? If it came too soon and they sent more ships, Earth would cease to exist.
I didn’t know that the Plutonians would target Earth next. It was an assumption. I didn’t know, for certain, anything about Jennifer’s dealing with them. I didn’t even know if it meant anything substantial that she’d taken Abaddon’s DNA along.
The mysteries were a fundamental problem. As the ancient Sun Tzu had said in The Art of War, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
I knew next to nothing about the Plutonians other than that they hated everyone and possessed fantastic technology. It was more than possible that they’d butchered Jennifer soon after she arrived.
If I thought about the Plutonians and Jennifer too much, I gnawed the skin off my right index finger’s knuckle. Since worrying wasn’t going to help anyone, I had to concentrate on what I could do, and get it done as quickly as possible.
Now, the Lokhars could have piloted their six cruisers outside of a star system, making them impossible to find. That seemed unlikely, however, as it would take such positioned vessels too long to reach the Ambassador when he wanted them. Thus, I’d discounted the tactic.
As I’ve stated earlier, faster than light, or FTL, travel in this part of the Orion Arm meant jump gates. Jump gates were only found in star systems, never in empty zones between the stars. The trick, therefore, was in picking the right star system to search.
I’d picked the Tau Ceti System for several reasons. One, it was close to Sol. Two, the system was uninhabited. Three, other nearby star systems had already come up empty from previous searches. Four, the Tau Ceti System contained more dust and debris than other systems, making it an ideal place to hide. The last made me reconsider the possibility. The best place to hide was often the worst place because it was the obvious place to check first. Sometimes, though, a person could overthink these things.
The biggest problem so far was having fifty people aboard my rather small stealth ship that only had one head, restroom, water closest, john, can—call it what you want. Ella had made a rotation roster, and that had helped some.
During the short trip, I’d discovered something about myself. I didn’t like having all these people aboard my ship. These last ten years, I’d gotten used to working alone. I found out something else: the longer I had the fifty people aboard, the less I was disliking it.
Maybe I was thawing out and becoming more social again.
I was presently alone in the piloting chamber, sitting back in my chair, staring up at a large screen. I could hea
r people clomping around outside in the corridor, and tried to ignore it.
I didn’t want to go out there and tell them to keep it down. Space was at a premium on the GEV and they had to walk somewhere. Fifty people was clearly too many. I should have only brought thirty-five, maybe just thirty.
With a shake of my head, I told myself to forget about that, concentrate on finding the Lokhar cruisers.
I fiddled with the scanner and debated launching a probe. Those were in exceedingly short supply, and once the probes were gone, I couldn’t resupply until I returned to the Fortress of Light, a journey of two years.
I’d already scanned and flown around three terrestrial planets in the inner system and now I worked on the first gas giant in the outer system. The excessive debris made the search harder than normal.
I scanned for three hours, drinking far too much coffee while I did. I’d begun to squirm in my seat and now stabbed a comm button.
“Did you find something?” Ella asked on the other end.
“No,” I snapped. “Is the john empty?”
“Ah…can you wait—?”
“I can’t wait,” I said, impatiently.
“Okay… I’ll put you at the top of the list.”
“You’d better,” I said, instead of saying thank you. It was my ship, after all, and I had to go.
I rushed out, waited another few minutes before the place was empty and returned to the piloting chamber a new man. What a difference.
A half hour later, my scanner pinged. I checked why and discovered a tiny signal at a distant dwarf planet, indicating possible comm traffic.
I ran an analysis of the signal and then the dwarf planet. It was a fast-spinning object at the near edge of the system’s Kuiper Belt. It was a hot dwarf planet spewing lots of radiation and radio waves. There was also a ton of debris shifting, orbiting around the planet like ocean eddies.
I ran a probability program through the predictive AI. The planetary radio waves might have caused the signal, and the heavy radiation emanating up from the dwarf planet would make that a less than ideal spot to hide. The predictive result was a 16 percent chance that the ping had come from a Lokhar cruiser.
Sixteen percent was better than anything else I had. Thus, I changed course, heading out to the Tau Ceti dwarf planet.
-32-
After too much time had passed, I maneuvered in high stealth mode near the dwarf planet. I hadn’t told anyone else about the new possibility. I didn’t want people pestering me for the latest update and clogging my comm channel while I was trying to search.
The dwarf planet was a little bigger than Pluto but hot instead of intensely cold. It was a lava pool of a planet for reasons I hadn’t yet detected. It was also far from the Tau Ceti star. The excessive dust and debris meant a person couldn’t even spot the star from here with the naked eye.
So far, I hadn’t detected anything positive other than that single ping earlier. I was already gliding through the shifting eddies of dust and debris. If the Lokhars were hidden—
My sensors suddenly went wild, blaring an alarm.
I manipulated my board, switching to a rearward scanner. A triangular-shaped, Lokhar heavy cruiser slid toward me, its beam ports hot for firing. Even as I watched, Karg-like red graviton beams speared toward the GEV. The graviton rays burned away interfering debris, which gave me a better idea as to just how thick it was out there.
The beams struck the GEV, heating the superior hull alloy instead of instantly thrusting particles apart and thus smashing through like they would have done to regular hull armor.
I opened a ship-wide comm channel with one hand and activated an emergency accelerator with the other.
“Get ready,” I said. “Hang on to whatever you can. We’re going to move, and you’re going to feel it.”
I clicked straps into place, turned my chair the other way, locking it in place, and pressed a switch.
We accelerated at thirty-two Gs. That overloaded the gravity dampeners so I felt intense pressure pushing against me.
The stealth ship leaped out of the enemy beam fire. We also struck the dust and debris with greater force. The ship shuddered from the multiple impacts. Worse, it must have lit us up as a target.
Seven active enemy targeting computers locked onto us.
Seven? I thought. What was going on here? Even with all the swirling junk, I should have seen those ships before this. How had they been able to hide from my superior sensors?
I slapped emergency controls. We quit accelerating so intense Gs no longer made it hard to lift my chest to breathe. My fingers blurred across a panel.
Outside the ship, a probe launched, emitting special signals. A second probe launched in a different direction.
I moved the stealth ship down. I did so slowly, however, using every stealth feature I could. It was too bad the GEV didn’t have phase abilities like the Shrike Lord Phase Suit. Then, I would have simply disappeared from regular space.
My comm board lit up. People were calling, no doubt wanting to know what was happening out there. I couldn’t blame them, but I ignored the calls as I concentrated on the situation, using passive sensors to study the enemy.
Red beams burned through the murky dust and debris. The two probes had begun accelerating, jinking this way and that, attempting to throw off enemy targeting—they also jinked like that to imitate the GEV. The probes doubled as decoys. More enemy beams joined the fray. Just how many cruisers had the Ambassador kept out here? Ella had said he’d claimed six. There were more than six, although not all of them appeared to be heavy cruisers.
One of the probes ignited as a graviton beam struck it. The exploding probe expelled hardened devices emitting signals to mimic a blasted ship’s debris. That was to buy us more time, as the enemy captains would believe they’d hit and destroyed the stealth ship.
A moment later, the second probe exploded. It, too, expelled the special hardened devices.
All the while, I slowly maneuvered to a new location.
I realized what must have happened. The GEV had been in stealth mode, but it had moved too quickly through the dust and debris. Somehow, the Lokhars knew to look for the evidence of a stealth vessel by watching the dust. My passage had stirred the space debris just enough. Maybe information concerning a new stealth vessel had come from the three original heavy cruisers I’d destroyed. Before sending their boarding teams, they might have launched a comm buoy.
I should have searched for that.
I maneuvered even more slowly so I wouldn’t stir any dust or debris forcefully enough to alert their targeting computers.
More enemy cruisers appeared on my passive scanner until I counted eleven. Five were heavy cruisers. The rest were light, nearly half the mass of the larger vessels. This was more than an ambassadorial escort.
Had Jennifer contacted the Lokhars? Or had the tigers learned about the Plutonian assault against Earth and begun readying a strike force to hit our homeworld?
I drummed my fingers on a console. That didn’t seem right. Five heavy and six light cruisers weren’t nearly enough to raid Earth, never mind trying to saturation bomb the planet. The Starkiens had far more beamships than those orbiting Earth. Our factories mass-produced drones, fighters and missiles. Workers were already building new silos on the Moon and re-supplying the spent ones on Earth. Besides, Earth Force warships stationed in other regions were hurrying home.
So, if that was the case, why had the Lokhars slipped eleven cruisers out here? Why hide in the Tau Ceti System? Were more warships on the way to augment the force? Were the Lokhars attempting to gather a true fleet near Earth to hit with overwhelming force?
A chill swept over me as I had a new idea. If Jennifer had contacted the Lokhars, were the tigers waiting for a second Plutonian strike against the homeworld? If the Plutonians hit now, or later with greater force, they might well destroy every defender just like the first time. Then, eleven cruisers could waltz in and saturation bomb the planet, giving
us the old one-two punch.
I needed to capture these cruisers, or capture the flagship, at least, and interrogate the admiral-in-charge. I had to figure out their plan so I could thwart it.
What good would it do to raid Acheron and come home to a dead homeworld?
As I contemplated these things, the Lokhar cruisers converged on the fake ship flotsam, the hardened emitters from the first destroyed probe. The enemy split into two groups. The first one had three heavy and three light cruisers. The second had two and three respectively and headed for the other set of emitters from the second destroyed probe.
A second chill swept over me. I had a sudden feeling the Lokhars knew exactly what kind of stealth ship they had destroyed—or that they believed they had destroyed. That meant two things. They knew about me and they were trying to glean center galaxy tech and would find the emitters soon.
I needed another mind, if nothing else, to bounce off ideas and help me think clearly. I needed a plan of action, and I needed it now.
-33-
First, I answered intra-ship calls and told people an edited version of what had happened. Second, I let Ella into the piloting chamber. She was the second non-effectuator to have reached the heart of the GEV. N7 had been the first.
She looked around before regarding me. “It doesn’t seem that much more sophisticated than a battlejumper bridge.”
“That’s because the chamber was redesigned to my specifications.”
Ella thought about that, finally plopping onto a swivel chair. “You wanted something familiar to operate?”
“Exactly,” I said.
“Why are you so tense?”
I showed her the Lokhar groups converging on the destroyed probes. The cruisers no longer accelerated, but launched shuttles, no doubt to collect what they could.
“They’re going to find the emitters,” I said, in case Ella didn’t understand the problem.
“Where does that leave us?”
“Exactly,” I said.
She scrunched her brow. “I doubt the tigers could have targeted your GEV by observing the disturbed dust and debris. You’re overlooking some obvious problems with the scenario.”
Target: Earth (Extinction Wars Book 5) Page 12
