“We will go where we have to go to find the pirates and we will do what we have to do to get there,” Rita said, captain firm.
The nanny sniffed at the reply, but kept her seat beside Rita with a towel ready to help if it was needed. When Rita was done, and Alex had given up a healthy burp and not too much spit up, she turned him over to the nanny for a diaper change and headed back for the bridge. There was only so much shit she was willing to put up with these days.
On the bridge, the crew had matters well in hand. They were on their way for the third jump and would be there soon enough. Rita chose to fill the time with battle drills.
Three days later, it was early morning by the way the ship reckoned time when they nudged their way up to the targeted jump. Again, the Northampton drifted through. They gave them a half hour, then went slowly through the jump themselves.
They need not have been so concerned.
The entire bridge crew groaned. “Oh damn,” Ursel muttered at Nav.
The Northampton had drifted just far enough away from the jump to clear it for the Exeter. There was no need to sniff.
“What is this muck we’re in?” Rita muttered, only half to herself. “Nav, was this supposed to be here?”
“No ma’am. According to the chart we got from General Longknife and the Santa Maria thing, it should be a star. A, ah, large white dwarf.”
“Well, it looks like the remnants of a nova to me,” Rita said.
“I’ll leave it to the scientists to call it something, ma’am,” Ursel reported, “but this is not empty space.”
“Not much vacuum here,” Rita agreed. “Matt, are you seeing this?”
“Yes, ma’am. It’s kind of screwed up the sniffer.”
“You got any suggestions?”
“Nothing brilliant, ma’am. All we can think to do over here is go to each of the jumps out of this system, and there’s supposed to be six of them, anyway, we go to all six and sniff around on the other side to see if we can pick up the trail again.”
“Yeah, that was pretty much what I was thinking, too,” Rita said.
“It’s going to take a while,” Matt added.
“Yeah. You feel a strong need for me to stay with you for, what, the next couple of weeks?”
“It looks to take that long, ma’am. No, we don’t need backup for this. If we get anything, well go looking for you before we stick our neck out too far. You have any plans on how to use your time?”
“I was kind of thinking I’d stop in to Savannah, see if Ray has dispatched some scout cruisers to that area and check if they needed some back up.”
“Most likely, they’ll need you far more than we will.”
“Then I’ll head back the way we came.”
“Yep.”
“Helm, reverse course. Get us out of here.”
“On our way, ma’am.”
Five days later, they pulled into High Savannah. The Patton was there, with Captain Izzy Imbota, so Rita checked in there first.
“Hey, Rita, you just missed Ray. He was here, talked to the new president and took off like a herd of turtles.”
“Have more scout cruisers arrived to search from here?” Rita asked, trying to stay on mission.
“Nope, haven’t seen one yet, but Ray did say more were coming. He picked up another one, a donation from the Society Navy base at Pitt’s Hope.”
“Well that’s good. So, what was Ray talking about here?”
“Maybe getting some ships built and crewed from Savannah. He had a meeting with Becky Graven, the present acting ambassador, or maybe not, since we’re all one big happy Society, aren’t we? Anyway, Graven and President Romali talked one evening, and then Ray couldn’t get out of here fast enough.”
“He tell you what it was all about?”
“He thinks they can get some ships, maybe heavy cruiser size, built here on the cheap if Wardhaven’s business can come up with the money to modernize the plants.”
“And he’s headed back to talk to my dad,” Rita said.
“Likely.”
“Maybe all they need to do is talk to me,” Rita said, and ordered her captain’s gig readied.
On the ground, the embassy had a limo waiting for her. A striking blond was already in the backseat. “So, you’re the Rita the General couldn’t quit talking about,” the woman said, then offered her hand. “I’m Becky Graven, the acting charge de affaires.”
“And Ray didn’t tell me anything at all about you,” Rita said, shaking the offered hand.
“There wasn’t much to tell. We had a mess here. He called in a lot of IOUs to get peace keeping troops to kind of create the peace. I know he was supposed to be here just for a quick meeting and then turn around and get back to you. Wasn’t there a baby involved?”
“I left little Alex back on the Exeter,” Rita said.
The foreign service type lifted an expressive eyebrow.
“Yes, I’m chasing around space in command of my own heavy cruiser, and I’ve got my baby with me and four nannies looking after things. Some gals do want to have it all.”
“Ray’s a lucky man,” she said, and it fell flat, not supported by a bit of diplomacy.
“He’s keeping the ministry going, like I did while he chased around space. Next year will be my turn again, no doubt. Now, what’s the business offer you made Ray?”
“Maybe I should take you to President Romali and let him make it himself.
“Please do.”
An hour later, Rita had listened to the proposal that Ray was taking back to her dad. Having learned business at her father’s knee, she had the president call up the fundamentals and lay them out in front of her.
It took Rita all of five minutes to know he was right. Savannah had been one of the major industrial powerhouses for Unity, under the party’s sway long before they got control of Wardhaven. That put it in worse shape, but not dead by any means.
Rita studied the charts and graphs, and saw a major industrial base, if it could be updated. “My father signed a major chunk of Nuu Enterprises Inc. over to me on my twenty-first birthday. I think it was his last-ditch effort to keep me out of the assault transport squadrons. It didn’t work. But those stocks are still in my name. If I signed them over as collateral for a major set of loans to finance a consortium of your industries and their upgrading, we could get this going a whole lot sooner.”
Rita paused to take in the look of shock on the president’s face. “It would also encourage a lot of reluctant types to take a chance on Savannah. Now, your laws, as I recall just confiscated all off-planet interests. You do intend to change that.”
“And write it into our constitution. No change in that law without a two thirds vote of the voters.”
“How soon can you get that?”
“The bi-elections are day after tomorrow. We added this proposed constitutional amendment onto the ballot after we talked to your husband.”
Rita smiled, and took a deep breath. There was no reason to think this over. “You tell you voters that if they pass that law, and modify their constitution, we can start building a new Savannah the day after the election.”
Chapter 20
Admiral Horatio Whitebred was finding that it was a glorious thing to be a pirate king.
On Mondays and Thursdays.
The rest of the week, it could be a real pain in the butt. At least, a pirate king who had to do all the work of setting up his kingdom. In the mud below, a crop was growing, but it would be a close thing.
Hopefully, it would come in before the food they’d brought ran out.
The new food, unfortunately, would be a lot of rice and millet.
Black Bart, named for his unusually dark complexion, brought in a ship from a planet called Hurtford. It was loaded with select cans of ham, frozen beef steaks and other delicacies along with several large containers of wine.
Whitebred threw a party.
Then he almost had to shoot Black Bart when the man had the audacity to co
mplain about not getting enough of a cut of the cargo.
“It’s food, damn your bleeding eyes,” Whitebred yelled. “We eat food. Drink the wine. You bring me machine tools, something we can sell on the open market and I’ll see that you get hard cash.”
Black Bart stormed away grumbling, his large Bowie knife still in its sheath.
“That’s another one you’re gonna need to kill,” Neva said.
“Honey, if I kill everyone you want me to kill, there’s not going to be anyone to do the work.”
She shrugged. She had a really sexy shrug. “You keep piling up problems, pretty soon, they’re going to pile up on you.”
She had a point.
Whitebred sat down and stared into his wine glass. “You got a point. We need some hard cash.”
“So, how do you get cash?”
“I had a cash cow, once,” Whitebred said, thinking of Henry Peterwald, “but he wants drugs.”
“We could grow drugs,” Neva said, eyes lighting up.
“We need to grow food first.”
“We don’t need any fat farmers,” was her come back. “They can grow some food and grow lots of drugs.”
“And I did save some seeds from that drug research station,” Whitebred said, thinking of a lot of things. “Yes, we can get some drugs growing.”
“What else could raise us some hard cash?” Neva asked.
“Real estate,” the admiral said. “Find some good planets and there would be lots of money rolling in.”
“There, you got your cash problems all solved. Grow drugs and find planets. That ought to keep our little pirate kingdom rolling in the dough.”
And then she kissed him, and did that thing she did and he lost interest in his problems for a while.
Chapter 21
General Ray Longknife got back to Wardhaven to find that his wife was there before him. Or rather, the impact of his wife’s portfolio had settled matters before he walked through his father-in-law’s door.
What was he married to, some sort of superwoman?
Anyway, he set to work with Andy and a couple of bean counters at Nuu Enterprises. They quickly got some really neat, new heavy machinery, jigs and fabrication facilities shipped off to Savannah. Andy had already gotten all the Rambler class scout cruisers off to Savannah, so Ray did paperwork, signed off on authorizations and wished he could get his hands on something to kill.
Unfortunately, no legal targets presented him with the opportunity.
And when his temper got the best of him and he tried to take big bites out of the retired Navy officer, Andy just laughed and asked him out for a beer.
The problem was, ships were disappearing. No one was quite sure how many. Maybe just three. Maybe as many as ten. It was hard to tell. Most merchant ships didn’t file reports on their intended routes. Sometimes owners knew when a ship failed to show up. Other times, there were just a story that a privately held tramp freighter was not showing up where its captain said he intended to go. The reports began to circulate around human space.
Insurance rates began to climb.
That got the right peoples’ attention. When money got involved, men of money talked to their political friends and things started to happen.
Unfortunately, the shipping between Earth and her first colonies, even the first fifty colonies, was not impacted by the pirates. No pirate was stupid enough to risk going that deep into organized human space. So, at least for the time being, the Senate of the Society of Humanity was unconcerned.
Around the rim, it was a different matter.
It also looked like there were more than one group taking to pirating for fun and profit. At least one, maybe two of the missing ships were all the way around on the other side of human space.
Ray found himself coordinating the effort on this side of the human sphere as Lorna Do and Pitt’s Hope fitted out spare light cruisers and joined the ships from Wardhaven out patrolling the space ways, looking for the ship that didn’t belong there.
They interrogated a lot of ships. So far, all of them had managed to produce papers that gave them an excuse for being where they were and doing what they were doing.
Something different was needed.
“How about Q ships?” Andy asked toward the end of one long and unproductive day.
“Q ships?” Ray said, using this as an excuse to raise his eyes from a pile of forms he was expected to approve and sign.
“A ship that looks like your average merchant ship, but has some guns under the crates on deck. They used them back in the wet Navy days. Submarines were still in their infancy and they were supposed to stop and inspect a ship before they sank it. This ship would sucker a sub in close, then start shooting.”
“What’s a submarine?” Ray asked.
Andy said something about empty headed gravel crunchers and explained the advantage of being able to sail both below and above the waves.
“So, you’re suggesting we have our ships go around looking like helpless bait and hope the pirate takes us up on the offer.”
“Yep.”
“We’d need to make our cruisers look more like merchant ships.”
“No problem. We can knock together some fake container boxes,” Andy said.
And Ray found himself asking for more money so they could make warships look like something else.
He got the money, but only after a lot of head shaking and not a few laughs.
“I hope Rita is enjoying herself,” he muttered as he added a new stream of requisitions to his already tall pile of paperwork.
* * *
“You know, little Alex, we need to get you home to your daddy before you forget what he looks like,” Rita said to a now snaggle-toothed smile that a drooling little fellow gave her.
They had negotiated an agreement between him and her not to bite the breast that fed him.
It wasn’t just that Alex might be missing Ray. Rita was missing him, too.
Not only was she missing him, but this pirate hunting was turning out to be boring. There was a whole lot of hunting and, thus far, no finding. No finding at all. A message from the Northampton had managed to connect with the Exeter.
They’d sniffed around all six of the jumps out of the wreckage of the nova and found nothing that they could call a trail. Worse luck, one of the jumps lead into a nebula that was even more messed up than the nova. Adding insult to injury, it offered seven jumps out.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, Professor Qin thought all the rich gases in the nova’s dust may have damaged her delicate gear. She wanted to bring the sniffer back to Wardhaven for cleaning, repairs and recalibration.
Rita approved the ship’s movement, wishing that it was the Exeter headed for home. Instead, she circled back to Savannah, and found that Ray or someone had come up with a better idea. Q ships.
It did not take her long to have the station above Savannah deck out the Exeter with fake containers that squared off the fine curves of her iced silhouette/ In less than a week they were headed back out to cruise slowly along some of the space lanes connecting some of the outer colonies that seemed to be the pirates preferred prey.
She was on her third planet when she got jumped by a ship that wished it hadn’t.
Chapter 22
Captain Chuck Quan hated his assignment. He and his crew had named their armed merchant ship the Bucket of Blood with high expectations of capturing ships, lovely girls, and money.
Instead, they were wandering around out in deep space looking at every rock, hoping to find a new Garden of Eden or something equally as marketable.
Yes, he’d heard the stories about how much money was to be made if you found a new Earth, but he had to wonder what the odds were on that. He’d jumped through a dozen systems and found plenty of planets, from molten hell hot to freeze-your-ass-off cold.
None had looked even a bit like mother Earth.
He put the Bucket through another jump. The kid in the science officer’s billet, who had litt
le more education than the cook’s helper, announced that there was nothing worth finding in this system, either.
Captain Quan headed for the next jump.
“Anybody know where we are?” the quartermaster asked from her station at the ship’s computer and comm desk.
“We’re in space,” the navigator answered.
“I know we’re in space, asshole, but where? Which way to Earth? Are we like, you know, lost?”
“We’re not lost,” Quan tossed in. “We can always go back the way we came.”
“I know captain,” the quartermaster said, “but how far away are we, you know, from anything human?”
“The further we are from where people have looked, the better chance that we’ll find something no one ever saw before,” the navigator pointed out.
“But what will we find?”
“Nothing this jump,” Captain Quan snapped. “Science, give me a course for a jump with a nice lush planet behind it.”
“One where Sheila can’t resist tossing off her clothes and frolicking in the waves with me,” Nav said, eyeing the quartermaster with only slightly bridled lust.
She made a face at him. “Keep dreaming, boy.”
Science allowed that there were two jumps out of here. Quan used his captain’s prerogative to pick the closest one and they headed for it at a nice one gee.
It was late in the watch the next day, and Quan was about to call it a day and leave it to the second officer to make the jump – when things got exciting.
The jump coughed up a ship!
“What kind of ship is that?” the quartermaster muttered, mouth hanging open.
“Damned if I know,” the navigator answered.
“It’s got two reactors,” the science nerd said, “but they ain’t in the rear.”
“Aft, damn it, kid, aft,” the navigator growled.
“Well, they ain’t anywhere I’ve ever seen reactors. Have you seen them along the side of a ball? Hell, man, have you ever seen a ship that was that fat around?”
Rita Longknife - Enemy Unknown Book I of the Iteeche War (Jump Point Universe 5) Page 11
