Joey shrugged and kept his eye on the blank readout from mass spec. He was chasing the last crumbs around his plate when the mass spec beeped and began to run a line across one window of Joey’s board. The line dipped and rose, squiggling its way across the screen.
Joey emitted a low whistle and enlarged the screen. Just to make sure, he had the screen go to basic mode. At the bottom of the screen, the names for the elements appeared.
Drugi was suddenly standing at Joey’s shoulder. “What’s that whistle mean?”
Joey used his finger to make sure he wasn’t tracing the wrong elements. “That whistle means we’ve hit the jackpot, me old man, the jackpot,” he said, knowing he was mixing and matching Paddy and Drugi’s accents and way of talking.
“That whistle means we’ve found oxygen and carbon on our planet,” he said, stabbing his fingers at the two bumps in the readout. “And where you find oxygen and hydrogen, you get water. And where you get water and carbon, you get all sorts of nice things.”
Suddenly, Joey was pulled from his seat. Suddenly, he and Drugi were doing a jig around the bridge, singing some sort of song, or maybe half a dozen all run into one.
“We’re wealthy men! I’m so wealthy, I’m so wealthy, I’m wealthy and happy and wealthy!”
They might have danced for the whole rest of the watch if the sensor suite hadn’t beeped. It started off beeping softly, then got louder and louder when Joey didn’t answer it immediately.
“What’s the damn racket,” Drugi finally demanded. “It’s knocking me off key,” not that he’d ever been close to a key the entire mad song.
Joey slid back into his seat. The flashing alarm was in a small window, one he hadn’t paid any attention to.
Now he reduced the mass spec report and expanded the other one. It took him a long moment to recognize what he was looking at. Then an even longer moment to take in what it meant.
“Drugi, I think there is another ship in the system.”
“There can’t be. We own that planet lock, stock, and barrel.”
“Well, there is another set of reactors all the way on the other side of the system. Maybe they just jumped in. I don’t think they were there before?”
“You don’t think? What do you mean, you don’t think?”
“You know as well as I do that this gear is junk, war surplus from the lowest bidder, and worse than that, it’s the stuff left over after the Navy picked it over and ran off with the best of the junk.”
“Quit crying in my beer, Joey. Tell me what you’ve got.”
The Science Officer of the Jackpot 27 suddenly felt the bite of the caution worm. He went over his screen with a fine-tooth comb. He called up the help screen and read it through carefully, even with Drugi breathing down his neck.
Well, Drugi was breathing down his neck to start with. But even Drugi could read. Joey knew Drugi was reading the help when he told Joey to hold off a minute before flipping to the next screen.
Both of them read, and both of them studied the screen readout.
“Joey, run the scan again,” Drugi ordered.
Joey tapped the screen readout. It did what it was programmed to do. At least Joey hoped it did.
Then he hoped it hadn’t.
“We’ve got a ship in system,” both of them said at the same time.
“And those reactors are like nothing in our database,” Joey added.
Chapter 3
General Ray Longknife watched over the nurse’s shoulder as he changed the baby’s first diaper. Ray did not doubt that he himself would be changing quite a few in the coming days.
“His balls are purple,” Ray said.
“They all are. That’s the way boys are born, sir,” the nurse said. “They change to a normal color in a couple of days.”
“Sorry.”
“Every father asks,” the nurse assured him.
The nurse fixed a new diaper in place expertly, while Ray marveled at the miracle of new life. The tiny figure laying there, perfectly formed arms and feet waving weakly. Ray counted ten tiny fingers and toes, complete down to their miniatures fingernails and toenails.
Rita had done an outstanding job.
The nurse ended Ray’s examination of his first born by wrapping the baby tightly in a blanket.
“Like a papoose,” Ray said.
“We call it playing baby burrito,” the nurse said, with a well-practiced laugh. “It helps them feel comfortable and they build up muscles pushing against the blanket.”
“My boy will be a strong trooper,” the general said.
“Yes, sir,” the nurse said.
“Do I get a chance to look at this new trooper before you ship him off to boot camp?” came in a tired voice from the bed in the New Birth Room.
“You most certainly do, dear,” Ray said. Under the nurse’s watchful eye, Ray picked up his new son and carried him oh so carefully to his mother.
“Mrs. Rita Nuu Longknife, may I introduce you to Alexander Longknife, your loving son,” Ray said, and transferred the child to his mother’s arms.
“Alexander, huh. You already a conqueror?” she asked the tiny form.
“It’s my grandfather’s name,” Ray put in quickly. “I thought we’d agreed that if it was a boy, I got to name it. A girl was yours.”
But Ray was talking to empty air. The mother had her son in her arms and was lost in his eyes. Ray took a seat beside the bed and managed to get one of his own hands into the mix of mother and child. The tiny eyes looked up at his mother, then over at his father. He seemed satisfied with what he saw . . . and yawned.
“Such a big yawn from such a little fellow,” Rita said.
“Those eyes,” Ray said.
“He has your eyes,” Rita said.
“I thought they were yours,” Ray countered.
“I’m just glad he has two eyes and a cute little button nose and ten toes and ten fingers. He does, doesn’t he?”
Before Rita undid the nurse’s handy work, Ray assured her that little Alex was all there. Tiny, but perfectly present and accounted for.
“I’m so glad you were here,” Rita said as the child closed those deep blue eyes and seemed ready to take his first nap.
“I promised you I’d be here,” Ray said.
“I know, but you kept going away for those damn meetings, and getting yourself into all sorts of trouble.”
“But I’m here now,” Ray said, cutting Rita off before she took the conversation where neither of them wanted to go on this special day.
This very special moment.
Ray’s commlink beeped.
“What is it?” Rita demanded.
“Andy’s been following the effort to track the lost liner from Santa Maria. He’d like to make a report. Do you want him to come here and report to both of us?”
Rita gave him a look that would have had a plebe doing pushups without even asking why, only how many . . . after finishing the first hundred.
“In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve done about all I’m going to do, after twenty hours of labor, so you just wander off and do what you men do, and me and Alex will get ourselves some sleep.”
The nurse moved in quickly to recover the sleeping child. He lay him down gently in a clear sided bassinet where Rita could keep an eye on him, assuming she was not as fast asleep as he was. Rita was right, the last twenty hours had been hard, but she’d been a trooper and insisted that they not fall back on cutting the child out.
“Is the baby in danger?” she’d demanded.
“No ma’am.”
“Am I any more the worse for the wear than my great-grandmother was?”
“No ma’am.”
“Then we do this the way God intended. God knows we started him that way, right Ray?”
“Oh, yes, my proud captain.”
Now, the captain laid back on her pillows, rested her eyes on her handiwork of this long, hard day, and was asleep before the nurse had the lights dimmed.
“We�
��ll take good care of them, sir.
“Good, because some good people are counting on me and mine to find them,” Ray said, and marched for the hospital’s exit.
Ray found Andy Anderson, retired captain from the Society of Humanity Navy and former commander of the 97th Defense Brigade, waiting for him in the vestibule of his office.
Ray had been none too happy to find Andy’s 97th Defense Brigade on that nameless moon during the war. Ray had been so sure his proud 2nd Guard Brigade could kick any Earthy scum right off the damn moon. Instead, they’d beat Ray’s brigade back, broken his back, and he would have bled out on that worthless moon if Rita hadn’t held long pass recall to lift him and the shattered wreckage of his brigade off the rock and back to safety.
Civilians wondered how Ray could get along so easily with people he’d tried to kill in the last war, and who had done their damnedest to kill him. For Ray, it was simple. He liked the cut of Andy’s jib a lot more than he liked some civilians.
Ray knew he could trust the man. The man had honor.
And no, Ray couldn’t define honor, but, like beauty, he knew it when he saw it.
And he didn’t see it in a lot of civilians.
“What have you got for me/” Ray said even before they took a seat.
“How’s Rita?”
“Mother and baby are doing fine,” Ray said. “Though around oh dark early this morning I would not have counted on it. Damn, that was hard on Rita. Can I offer you a drink?”
“She’s a tough woman,” Andy said, “and I’ll take a wee bit of Scotch if you think the sun is below the yardarm.”
Ray poured from the cabinet beside his desk. “I would not be here if she wasn’t one tough woman. Your boys and girls were hard as nails on us.”
“No tougher than we had to be to stay alive. Your boys were no slackers,” Andy said, smiling at the old reference as he accepted the offered glass and took a sip.
“Enough talk of old times and of how the family is, Andy. Tell me what you’ve got.”
“Not much, Ray, and it’s not for lack of trying.”
“Well, you have to know more than I do.”
“Yes, but not all that much more, old horse.”
“What happened to old Father Joseph and his boy David from Santa Maria?”
“I don’t know. We sent two ships out, one the way you took, and one the way the insurance companies want us to take to Santa Maria. They’ve got this gadget. It’s got a name long enough to choke a horse, but I call it the space sniffer. If you can believe what the scientists claim, it can sniff the ship’s plasma exhaust trail. Tell that wee bit of space that is thicker than the natural background. Especially since there’s only been a few ships along both routes, your Second Chance along the wild ride and the Can’t Believe I did That and the Prosperous Goose along the more sedate route.”
“And what did this fantastic new gizmo discover?” Ray asked, trying to hold on to his temper. He wanted answers. He’d asked the old priest to bring his grandson into space. He’d known there were risks, but, damn it, to lose them on the trip back to human space!
That was just wrong.
“Nothing. Nada. Zip. They say they picked up your exhaust and the Can’t Believe’s trail, but nothing else. They claim they can tell the difference between the two ships just by the difference in your reaction mass,” the old sailorman said, shaking his head.
“Can you believe it? Hellfrozeover keeps a record of just what is in the reaction mass they’re selling to each ship. The more water and methanes in the delivery, the more they charge. They know what was in all three of your tanks, and the sniffer didn’t find more or different stuff along the two trails.”
Ray frowned at his scotch as he slowly swirled the amber drink in his glass. “Are they saying that the Prosperous Goose and the old padre didn’t follow the course they were supposed to?”
“The skipper of the Goose filed a trip plan, right along the path of the Can’t Believe. If we can trust the sniffers, they didn’t sail that plan.”
“Then what plan did they sail? I’m assuming that the padre and David were on the Goose when it went missing. Am I right?”
“Sad to say, yes, you are. Both the ships we sent to Santa Maria arrived. Both unloaded their cargo. And yes, we didn’t just send a scouting mission to check on the Goose. We sent a full load of cargo. We had to cut the rate we charged and pay more for insurance, what with the damn Goose missing, but we got there and even brought Rose back with her mother’s niece. So, we have two kids to go with our explorer ships.”
“Put Jon on the Second Chance and get her out there, checking out variations on the route the Goose might have taken.”
“Will do, and we have some idea what the Prosperous Goose may have gone off looking for.”
“We do?”
“I didn’t just have ships chasing the Goose. I posed a question to the spy and he found it an intriguing challenge.”
“He does like challenges,” Ray Longknife agreed. The spy probably had a name, but he didn’t use it and no one seemed to remember it. Spy was his game and spy was his name. He headed up Wardhaven’s Central Intelligence Bureau and what he got interested in usually got answered.
Unfortunately, Ray seemed to be raising all the interesting questions that the spy couldn’t answer.
“What did the spy find?” Ray asked.
“It seems that the skipper of the Goose took a retainer from a certain group of men interested in finding real estate to sell to the kind of folks that find life among the rim worlds tame.”
“God in heaven, not that,” Ray breathed.
“Yep. Find an inhabitable world and we’ll shower you with more money than you and your father and grandfather ever dreamed of. The Goose’s skipper paid to have his tanks topped off with the best reaction mass, and then pressurized them to the max his tanks would handle. We calculate he had enough for a good two dozen jumps.”
“And the tame route to Santa Maria is what, six jumps?”
“Six one way, half a dozen the other,” the retired captain said, and smiled at his own joke.
“So, coming and going, he likely did ten or twelve extra jumps, looking for a nice planet with water and air.”
“Yep.”
“Did the bigger fool who put this fool up to that have any idea where he went?”
Andy was shaking his head before Ray finished the question. “They say that they have no idea where he went, or even if he went. They just put him on retainer. That didn’t mean they were paying him to put his ship at risk.”
“In a pig’s eye,” Ray snapped. “Andy, this gold rush approach to space exploration is not going to turn out well. Ships are going to go missing. People are going to get killed in ships that should never have been rowed away from the pier. I tell you, Andy, it’s going to be a mess. Hell, we might even stumble onto something we’ll regret.”
“Such as?” Andy asked, raising an eyebrow.
“I don’t know. Some disease brought home by a ship that didn’t know how to sanitize its gear. Who knows, we might even run into something that doesn’t want to share space with us. Space is big, but not big enough for the both of us. It wasn’t big enough for Unity and the Society of Humanity.”
“And look how that turned out,” Andy said.
“If Urm hadn’t been offed when he was and that mad admiral had started rocking Wardhaven,” Ray Longknife said, and then paused.
“Is the spy keeping an eye on that Whitebred fellow? I hated leaving Savannah with that bastard still holding out in the yards and dock area of their space station.”
“He’s still there. He can’t touch Savannah from the station. We’ve got Marine guards at all the yard exits. He’s got armed thugs guarding them too. It’s a standoff.”
“Let’s hope it stays that way,” General Ray Longknife said.
“Ray, I’ve got the watch covered here,” Andy said. “Now you know as little as I know. Why don’t you go home and get some sleep?
”
“I can’t. I’ve got the watch tonight. I promised Rita a good night sleep. That I’d take care of little Al if he got fussy.”
“Well, you go be a good daddy and husband and let me mind the store. Trust me, that kid may be a tiny thing just now, but before you know it he’ll want the car keys and be heading off to college. Enjoy him while you can. And enjoy Rita while you can, too. I’d give the world for a just another hour with my Betsy.”
Ray accepted the wisdom the old captain offered him. He took a moment to finish his drink. Another moment to glance through his computer at all the SOBs nipping at his hind quarters. Then he rose.
“Andy, keep an eye on Whitebred. Oh, and see if there’s anything you can do to stop any captain with way too much optimism from dashing off to who knows where and who knows what. There’s got to be something politicians can do about it. They’re all the time passing stupid laws. This might be the best law they ever passed.”
“Yes, Ray. I’ll see what I can do, Ray. Now go, Ray.”
And with that friendly encouragement, Ray left.
Chapter 4
Admiral Horatio Whitebred paced his office. He was trapped. Again.
He hadn’t like the feeling of being trapped the last time. He didn’t like it any more this time.
But then, this time, he wasn’t in cuffs and locked away in a brig.
No, this time they have you locked away in a dockyard.
So Whitebred paced.
For the thousandth time, he reviewed his situation. Smythe-Peterwald had cut him off. Whitebred still had access to the secret accounts Milassi had left behind. He had no problem paying the henchmen guarding the gates into the yard. He could stay here for a long time.
And do what?
Yeah, stay here and breathe the air, until some smart type at the space station central control wised up and cut back on the oxygen flowing to the yard.
Nope. This was no place to retire.
There was no reason to stay. And, no one could make him stay.
I do command a Navy, don’t I?
The problem, as usual, was where to go?
Rita Longknife - Enemy Unknown Book I of the Iteeche War (Jump Point Universe 5) Page 2
