Admiral Lee thanked him and turned back to Captain Han, “Captain, the sixth fleet has been scouting very energetically and your fighters will be tasked with intercepting and destroying any who stray too close. We cannot allow them to find and pin us down while they send in seven hundred fighters.”
Something the admiral said caused a reaction in the young officer. Admiral Lee continued to speak to Captain Han, but then stopped mid sentence, looking quizzically at him. He asked, “Commander?”
Captain Padilla said, “Sir, you said that the bugs were scouting energetically...” Admiral Lee looked at him with his usual intense focus and said, “Yes...?”
He said, speaking slowly, “Sir, this sixth fleet, it wasn’t designed to establish a colony, it was, still is, a war fleet, designed to seek out and destroy. Sir, they’re looking for those colony ships. I think we need to help them find what they’re looking for.”
Everyone was silent, looking at him, so he continued, still thinking hard, “Sir, we believe that four of the five remaining colony fleets gathered together in an effort to destroy or render impotent the pursuing combined home world fleet. We believe that they hoped to be able to destroy or incapacitate their enemy, allowing fifth colony to escape and establish itself on a new world. After running for two thousand years, they became convinced that they were going to die, so they elected to finally stand and fight, hoping that the effort would allow that one distant colony, the one that had not used its gravity engines for an entire year, to escape, to live. We don’t know how that plan would have worked out, but the most probable outcome would have been the eventual destruction of the species. Our intervention, sir, has given them a second chance.”
Admiral Lee asked, “How, second chance?” Captain Padilla thought furiously for another moment, then looked around the room, “Sir, we need to help them find the remains of the colony fleets. That is what they are looking for, and we need to help them.”
Admiral Lee slowly nodded his head and said, “…Because their job is finished.” He nodded, “Yes sir, their job is finished. The question now is: what are they going to do? I think...I think sir that they are going to want to go home, unless we screw it up by allowing them to find us first.”
Captain Han asked, “If that is so, won’t that still leave a terribly dangerous species in relatively close proximity to us?” Captain Padilla looked at her and asked, “Sir, when the bug colony went to war with its home world, humans were living in city states, using bronze tools and riding on horseback. Where will we be two thousand years from now?”
Admiral Lee was beginning to smile, and said, “While they’ve been in space, their level of technology has been frozen in time, and humanity went out to the stars. Commander, what if they can’t make it back, or choose to colonize locally?” Captain Turner jumped in, “Sir, we help them. I think we owe them that. Hell, if they can build mother ships, so can we. Let’s help them get home.”
Admiral Lee was by now positively beaming. He asked, “Commander, what if they know about that system, and decide they don’t want to travel for another two thousand years?” Captain Padilla shrugged, “I have a hunch they won’t want to do that, but if they do, we’ll discourage them. I mean, sir, look at it from their viewpoint. All they are going to find are the remains of their own ships. In fact, we need to ensure that that is all they find. We need to sanitize the remains of the Essex and the five – no, I’m sorry, six – destroyers, so that they only find bug remains.”
Captain Turner nodded and said, “They won’t know that all we have is this tiny fleet, all they’ll know is that we destroyed five colonies with little or no losses of our own. We could perhaps leave something for them, a floating translator. We have several months to build something that would tell them that it’s time to go home. They’ll have to spend at least a year or so in a local solar system, refueling and repairing their ships, we could point them at a nearby solar system – not that one – and offer to help them get home.”
Admiral Lee looked at a chrono on the bulkhead and turned to Lt. Graziano, “Lieutenant, cancel all my appointments for the rest of the evening, except for Captain Speer, which is now just fifteen minutes away. I want you three.…,” he was looking at Captains Padilla and Turner and WO Kana, “…to remain here. Captain Han, please stand by in my quarters until I’ve finished speaking to Captain Speer.”
He looked at his aide, “Lieutenant, please ensure that these three have enough coffee and doughnuts to last them for several hours. They are going to be spending that time working out a rough outline of what we’ve just discussed. Additionally, I want you to send out a message to all ships to prepare for a possible departure. If we don’t want the bug fleet discovering just how ineffective our fleet actually is, save for the Dresdens, the best way to ensure that is for us to get the hell out of here. Have a courier ship standing by. I’ll draft a message to Earthgov, bringing it up to speed. I’m simply going to tell it that we believe that this sixth fleet is preparing to leave for home. I think our politicians may well decide not to go to war, but if not, if I’m wrong, I’m going to stonewall it while you miscreants make nice with our new friends. Oh, Lt.? I need our late ambassador, Mr. or Professor Leung? I need him here yesterday. Don’t send that courier until I’ve made certain I’ve got all my ducks in a row.”
He added, “I’ve got a little task to perform and then I’ll rejoin you.
Admiral Lee spent a few minutes in his office, left, looked in on the two ship captains, and closed the hatch.
In the ante room, he greeted the once again tardy captain, “Captain Speer, I’m in the middle of an important meeting, so I don’t have much time for you. I’ve got a problem on Base Jupiter and you are my solution. I’m sending you on a courier to Earth. You are to hand carry your new orders. You’ve got just enough time to return to the Brezhnev and pack.”
Captain Speer stared, “You are relieving me?” Admiral Lee smiling agreed, “Yes I am. Needs of the service take precedence over our personal desires. Captain, your shuttle pilot has been informed of your imminent departure, so I won’t keep you longer. The courier will dock on the Brezhnev in roughly two hours, so you’d best hurry.”
Captain Speers angrily demanded, “Why? What possible reason could you have for taking away my ship? I want an answer.”
Admiral Lee stepped forward to put his nose in Captain Speers face, “I don’t know what Navy you work for, but in the Federal Navy, a captain says, ‘yes sir’ when he gets an order. You have ten minutes to board your shuttle. If you are not there in ten minutes or less, I’ll send Marines to look for you and hold you here until the courier departs. Is. That. Clear. Captain?”
Captain Speers flushed and opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out. Admiral Lee raised his voice, no longer smiling, “Constitution, Constitution, I require two Marines in my anteroom. Now.”
Late that evening, with his ever-present aide, Admiral Lee again sat down with his two Dresden captains. They outlined the tentative plan, and at one point he said, “You know, you have made my life much easier. Up to that working dinner, I was looking at an either-or situation, and you’ve given us something that not only falls in between, it promises to eliminate a war instead of a species. The longer this thing dragged on, the more convinced I became that we have been making a fatal mistake. By ‘we’, I mean, Earthgov. I am going to do the following things: I am going to give the ambassador another opportunity for fame and glory, I’m going to scour the debris field and remove anything that smacks of the remains of an Earth ship, and I’m going to appoint you two to oversee the operation. I’m taking the fleet home. It isn’t doing us any good here, no matter what happens. If need be, we’ve got time to go home and come back, but if we stay here, we’re taking a huge chance that these beings will blunder into us and attack. I don’t want to lose any more human lives, nor do I want to take any more of theirs. I’m going to tell my superior that our fleet simply could not remain in space any longer, it had to come h
ome, and I’m going to do whatever possible to tie Congress up in knots so that it doesn’t force us into another war. We’ll either die, or our souls will, and I much prefer not having to live with the knowledge that I’ve needlessly killed.”
Chapter 51
Admiral Alexi Tretiakov, Fleet Carrier Gresham
Admiral Tretiakov was on his bridge when the general orders arrived. It was early in the ship day and he was sitting with a cup of tea, reading a readiness report. His pilots had just returned from a relatively long-range sweep through one of the immense and slowly expanding debris fields.
Ships employed gravity drive systems that not only accelerated them, those same fields provided limited protection against small objects, but the greater the relative velocity of the ship, the greater danger large chunks of former space craft posed. The recent battles had strewn a relatively huge area so full of small to large pieces of debris that the region was off-limits to normal travel, and would be unless and until the field was cleaned, a huge task, one that would grow more difficult the longer it was put off.
The destroyed ships had been moving, relative to the huge void and scattered stars systems surrounding it, meaning that debris was moving and expanding.
Their task had been to plot locations and identify ship remains. In general, the entire area would appear a bright, flashing red on navigation screens, and any navigator who deliberately piloted a commercial ship into one of these fields automatically voided the ship’s insurance and his license. If that was all that happened, he would be fortunate.
It had taken the various colonies and former colonies decades to clear their own systems of civil war debris, and sanitize them well enough that ships could once again navigate through them, but the Void wasn’t inside a solar system and of course, the approaching Bug fleet meant even the Navy stayed away – until now.
Alexi had spent an evening with Admiral Lee and had been assigned the task of cleaning up the remnants of the Essex and her destroyer escorts. There would remain a small number of Dash 6 fighters from that first encounter, but fighters were small and when their fusion bottles exploded there was rarely anything left that would be large enough to find, much less identify.
His son-in-law also remained behind. He’d told Alexi that the Bugs were now close enough that light from the various battles had reached them. Admiral Lee had taken his motley collection of ancient ships back to Earth, leaving behind Alexi, the two Dresdens and four FFC’s.
The work was backbreaking. Computer simulations had plotted the probable locations of the remains of the Essex, and his fighters had found most of the larger chunks. Crew people from the military freighters cut them down into manageable pieces, small enough to load inside the ships and jumped into a nearby solar system where they were dropped onto a lifeless proto planet.
Alexi ensured that records were kept so that at some point in the future they could be recovered. He hoped that someone would think the task worthwhile.
The Bugs had sent scouts forward, and although they were still several weeks away, Alexi was working his crews around the clock to finish so that they could depart before the Bugs detected their presence.
Captain Padilla – his son-in-law – was anxiously awaiting a courier, carrying Professor Leung. Earlier in the war he’d been appointed by EarthGov to attempt to establish communications with the Fifth Fleet. On that trip Captain’s Padilla and Turner led a small force of two Dresdens and several Hawks. They’d sent an unmanned shuttle into close proximity of the Bug fleet. It carried a transmitter and once it was within range began sending a simple message that the wildly liberal professor assumed would allow the Bugs to begin communicating with humans.
They had, but with an overwhelming number of fighters and destroyers. The small force had barely escaped.
Now, they had a second chance, perhaps a last chance to avoid engaging in a final battle that would bring to a violent end billions of years of evolution.
Captain Turner had a black box, and his crew was programming it to broadcast the same basic signals, allowing the two species to begin to peacefully communicate. This time around, they knew how the Bugs communicated. Alexi had been surprised to learn that Kestrels had skulked deep inside the fleet, and had snooped on their communications. His own carrier and the fighters she launched wouldn’t have been able to get within ten to twenty million kilometers. Literally able.
Much was riding on this experiment, and most Bug ‘experts’ were convinced they would mindlessly react violently.
Alexi hoped for a different response. Like Admiral Lee and some few others, he was highly conflicted. He badly wanted to retire from the Navy and return to Lubya. His daughter’s career showed promise and Lt. Cdr. Padilla was destined for a brilliant future – if he survived. If they survived. Meanwhile, Admiral Tretiakov was tired.
His last fighter docked aboard the Gresham and they began accelerating on a heading away from the Bugs and toward the same distant solar system that now held a few tons of the Essex and her six escorts. There remained some evidence that the first four Bug fleets had extracted a pound of flesh, but it would take months or years of dedicated search to find the small pieces, and the Sixth Fleet didn’t have access to the same computer models that Alexi did.
All the Bugs would find would be dead Bug ships – hundreds of them.
This operation had been gruesome for the humans – they were poking around in the largest cemetery in human space, and the only one that held the corpses of two different intelligent species. He had no idea what the Bugs would think, how they would react, but he thought it wouldn’t be relief that the war was over, nor did he think that the war was actually over.
They were to stand well away from the battle sites, but close enough to jump in to support the two Dresdens if they were located and attacked.
If the Bugs reacted as feared, Admiral Lee authorized him to use his jump systems.
The Brezhnev jumped in, now with Captain Han in command of a ship that was already functioning better. She brought with her sealed orders for the two Dresdens. Admiral Lee apparently liked the stolid captain of the Brezhnev, but understood that her ‘by-the-book’ approach to the Navy would be anathema to the two wildly creative captains, so he created a new, independent command, consisting of the Grant and Lee and a large chunk of the Hawks and Dresdens.
Alexi’s Gresham was tasked with remaining well back with the Brezhnev while the stealthy Kestrels lurked in the vicinity of the debris field.
A large flight of Bug fighters was detected, heading toward the immense debris fields.
Admiral Tretiakov ordered all ships to pull back at minimum acceleration. As he stood on his bridge, he watched the views relayed from the skulking Hawks and Kestrels.
The two huge carriers edged out and away from the scene of the death of hundreds of thousands of beings. He thought these beings might want some privacy.
Over the next few days more and more Bug fighters nosed into the immense field, larger than one AU and growing ever larger. There was so much that he thought the Navy would have to mount a cleanup operation.
Following the civil war, civilian contractors had developed an interesting technique, utilizing a gravity drive as a sort of huge vacuum, collecting debris and dumping it on the nearest large body. This time around, it would take years, possibly decades to finish, but since the field was expanding, it was necessary.
They moved the carriers out to twenty million kilometers and left a variety of remotes to watch behind as the stealthy Navy ships edged back and away.
One of those remotes had a transmitter, and when he judged their fighters were within a million kilometers he made an announcement, “This is Admiral Tretiakov. We stand on the edge of an immense field of debris and the remains of hundreds of thousand sentient beings, born in the depths of space and never destined to set foot on a planet – any planet. I cannot imagine the thoughts or feelings they may have had, but we believe that after two thousand years they must have real
ized that they could run no longer. It is to God to understand the fate that set their course into humanity’s neighborhood, to God to judge their reaction to us. They are now in His Hands, and I pray that He is gentle with them, as I pray He is with our own dead.”
He paused, his eyes on the image of the approaching fighters, “From the moment of the destruction of the Horsham up until this very moment, there has been no communication between our two species, save for death and destruction. In just a few moments humanity is going to attempt once again to open a bridge between our species. I ask that all nonessential crew stand, remove any head coverings and bow your heads.”
He nodded to a crewman and she touched a pad, sending a signal to the distant device. It took nearly a minute for the signal to reach the antenna, the same amount of time for the acknowledgement.
He said, “We are now communicating to this species. May God have mercy on their souls, may He guide and protect all of us. That is all, please return to your duties.”
Hawk Flight (Flight of the Hawk Book 3) Page 32
