“Indeed. That is the very dish. We have had a few opportunities to serve it in the last hour or so. Now, one-one-four, I have new instructions for you. Am I correct in surmising that your vessel is a horse disguised as a camel? Over.” The pilot probably spotted the subtle modifications to the engine nozzles, the well disguised but larger than normal bulge in the hull to accommodate the enlarged fusion reactor, and the military-grade sensor emitters, all of which—to a well-trained eye—said that the Clover’s performance would be decidedly more sprightly than that of a stock Piper-Grumman Shetland class microfreighter.
“You have keen eyes. Over.”
“How many Gs can you sustain safely? Over.”
“Fifteen. Over.” That was the rating, anyway. Max and Brown had gone over the design and the naval upgrades and jointly decided the real number was closer to eighteen or twenty, but Escort One didn’t need to know that. Before the Navy modified it, the little vessel could pull no more than 3.3 Gs.
“Very good. That will blow some sand in our adversaries’ faces. I have new instructions for you. It is too dangerous for you to proceed to your landing as planned. Rather, you will rendezvous with some of our forces in space and they will see you safely to the surface. I am transmitting a set of coordinates. Pull your best acceleration all the way to that point. No terminal deceleration--the vessel with which you are rendezvousing will match velocities with you. Escort Two will clear your twelve and I will cover your six. From their present trajectories, none of our visitors can pull enough delta V to catch you at 15 Gs. There are several that were stealthed in orbit here and they are accelerating hard now thinking that they can catch the camel. They will be very disappointed to see that you are a horse, especially now that by redlining their drives they have given away their positions. They will not live very long to regret the miscalculation. Over.”
At the specified coordinates, the Clover encountered the immense Rashidian Carrier, the RRS Riyadh, which had been conducting operations just outside the orbit of Rashid VI and only two AU from the Clover’s initial position. About forty-five minutes after the new instructions from Escort One, twelve Rashidian SF-89 Qibli fighters appeared to escort the microfreighter the rest of the way to the Carrier. Max had hardly set the landing skids on the Carrier’s deck before it pulled a high G two axis course change that must have raised her Chief Engineer’s blood pressure thirty or forty points. When the gigantic vessel straightened out on its new heading, the dissonant vibrations transmitted through the deck to the soles of his Max’s feet as he and Doctor Sahin walked through the ship told Max’s exquisitely sensitive sense of warship machinery that all three mains and both auxiliary coolant circulating pumps for the carrier’s four massive fusion reactors were being redlined.
The Rashidians assigned an earnest but selectively communicative Lieutenant Commander to escort (and keep an eye on) Max and the doctor. The young man, about Max’s age, explained their course, rate of acceleration, and how the Clover would be ejected upon arrival at Rashid IV at a suitable distance. He went on to detail how, by redlining its drive, there would be just enough time and space for the Clover to decelerate from the Carrier’s velocity to entry interface, how Rashidian flight controllers would clear a path for it from entry to the landing pad, and how fighter/interceptor aircraft would escort it to a safe landing. The only thing he did not explain was why the entire Unified Rashidian Kingdom was putting forth such a profligate expenditure of men and resources dedicated to seeing that one Lieutenant Commander and one Doctor/Acting Ambassador were deposited safely on the surface of Rashid IV at the earliest possible moment. What could be so urgent?
At least, now that they were on a gigantic Carrier surrounded by the aggressively defensive swarm of its Combat Area Patrol fighters, there was no chance of any further attempted ambush. Which, of course, was the point.
The ejection maneuver took place exactly as planned. The Clover simply lifted off the hangar deck and nudged itself out the port side of the Carrier on maneuvering thrusters. Even though the microfreighter had the same forward velocity as the Carrier, the larger ship was under full acceleration while the Clover was not. As a result, the two vessels rapidly separated. The Carrier’s enormous, blunt shape dwindled in only a few moments to nothing more than the brilliant pinprick of light created by its huge fusion drive, seeming to move ever so slowly against the background of fixed stars, the vastness of space reducing the carrier’s great speed and enormous bulk, as it reduces all the puny handiwork of man, to insignificance.
Immediately after separating from the Carrier, Max programmed the Clover’s ID transponder, in accordance with Escort One’s instructions, to broadcast Kilo Papa Lima Charlie. Within a minute of leaving the carrier, the microfreighter was surrounded by a veritable cloud of thirty-six Qibli fighters arrayed in a flying wedge, defying any foe to challenge them. Max never knew whether these fighters were launched from the carrier, in which case they would have a long flight back home, or whether they were based on or near Rashid IV.
After several minutes of hard deceleration, the Clover encountered the tenuous outer fringes of Rashid IV’s atmosphere. The leading surfaces of the vessel began to heat as the ship entered the transitional regime in which space, where fusion and rocket engines propel ships silently along the elegant trajectories of Newton and Kepler, gives way to atmosphere, where air-breathing jets push aircraft with a deafening roar through buffeting gases subject to the laws of Bernoulli, Navier, and Stokes. When the formation had descended to about 100 kilometers, the space fighters peeled away, one two-ship element at a time in quick succession, their brightly blue-white drives tracing graceful curves against the deep blue-black sky as they soared back to the infinite dark that was their natural abode. Each element was instantly replaced by a pair of sleek AF-97 “Haboobs,” atmosphere fighters built jointly by the Rashidian Kingdom and the Romanovan Imperium (the Romanovans called it the “Gladius”). The hand-off took place in a series of maneuvers so beautifully choreographed and so quickly and precisely executed that Max knew this particular group of space pilots had practiced this maneuver extensively with this particular group of aircraft pilots. Either all Rashidian pilots were outstanding, or Max had just seen a crack atmosphere fighter squadron take the place of a crack space fighter squadron. This was yet another sign of how important his and the doctor’s safety were to the Rashidians. As an old saying of obscure origin goes, “they cared enough to send the very best.”
As Max was explaining to the doctor what was going on and why he was so impressed, the comm panel called for attention with two beeps. Twenty seconds later, the business-like yet studiously relaxed voice of a Rashidian pilot came into the cabin. “Union Microfreighter Golf Papa Golf Charlie seven-two-one-one-four this is the Tabi’a Commander, my call sign is Yarmouk Three, please acknowledge. Over.”
“Yarmouk three, this is one-one-four. We read you. Over.”
“One-one-four, does your database include the communication protocols from the Equilateral exercises held last year? Over.”
Max checked. All the materials from the joint Union/Rashid/Romanova exercises held ten months previously were in the database.
“Yarmouk Three, this is one-one-four. Affirmative. We have a complete set of documentation for the ex, including the Oscar Hotel and the Romeo Oscar Echo. Over.” Meaning, the Operational Handbook and the Rules of Engagement.
“Excellent, one-one-four. Then please implement Formation Comm Protocol Bravo with you as the pigeon. You are assigned new call sign ‘Sadeek One.’” Max saw the doctor smile broadly at that. He made a mental note to ask what ‘Sadeek’ meant. “If we are not successful in establishing communications in two minutes, return to this frequency and the current encryption. Over.”
“Roger that. Formation Comm Protocol Bravo, I’m the pigeon, new call sign Sadeek One, and if we are not talking in two minutes, come back here using the same encrypt. Changing frequencies now. Over and out.”
Max called up the p
rotocol and started punching in the frequencies. He also loaded the applicable encryption scheme, known as Casablanca, into the Clover’s ENDEC, or ENcrypter/DECrypter, better known as the “Blue Box,” even though as long as anyone could remember, they were all painted reddish orange.
While he was doing this, Max asked, “What does ‘sadeek’ mean?”
“It is a felicitous choice of appellations. It means ‘friend.’”
“Sounds good to me.” Pause. “Or, maybe not. ‘Speak, friend, and enter.’” He gave a brief, apprehensive, chuckle.
“What is ‘speak, friend, and enter’?”
“An inscription over a doorway in one of my favorite books when I was younger.”
“What was on the other side of the door?”
Max thought for a moment, wondering how to summarize something like twenty pages of a complex and classic work of English Literature. He did his best. “A long, dark journey, full of wonder and deadly peril. But, a journey that had to be made.”
“Let that not be an omen.”
“Amen. That author wrote about omens a lot. But, now that I think of it, I don’t think he believed in them. All right. I’ve got everything set up.” He keyed for transmission. “Yarmouk Four this is Sadeek one. Do you read? Over.”
The response was immediate. “This is Yarmouk Four reading you five by five Sadeek one. I have new instructions for you.” At that point, the other pilot described a series of maneuvers, altitude changes, and a new landing point in such densely woven aerospace jargon that, excluding article adjectives and the occasional adverb, the doctor was certain he understood only one word in twenty. When Max had repeated the instructions back to Yarmouk four in equally impenetrable language and followed the fighter squadron through a change in course and altitude, he turned to his companion. “Let me guess. You didn’t get any of that.”
“Scarcely a word. You might as well have been speaking Pfelungian. I can’t imagine why you would have to guess. You conducted a conversation for minutes on end consisting of nothing but incomprehensible pilot argot, which I have long suspected pilots specifically evolved as a coded language so that members of your elite club of drive and rudder men can speak without being understood by the uninitiated and, further, as a kind of secret club handshake so that you can recognize one another. It should entail no guesswork at all to conclude that I, an ignorant cretin who merely speaks a dozen and a half languages or so and who possesses a veritable plethora of university degrees in five or six different fields, would be unable to comprehend a word of the proceedings.”
“That’s ‘drive and thruster man.’ Thruster.”
“See what I mean? You people have your own language, constructed with incomprehensibility and exclusion as an objective and you have the undisguised temerity to wonder that you are not understood. You might as well build a fire and marvel that it generates heat, light, and smoke.”
Max knew better than to offer the rejoinder that Medicine was just as bad or even worse, because, while aerospace jargon had its basis in Standard, most medical terms are derived from Latin, the language of a long-dead civilization that is currently spoken only by the Romanovans, and Greek, a beautiful but now-obscure language spoken by only a few million of humanity’s hundreds of billions, because he knew from experience that Sahin would never admit the comparability of the two cases. He decided just to go ahead and explain what was going on.
“So, in the plainest possible terms, here is what is happening. It is believed that our original flight plan has become known to people who want to kill us. Accordingly, our descent and flight path have been changed. As much as possible it now takes place over the sea. We will travel with this escort until the last two and a half minutes or so, or just before we cross the coast. Then, the escort will peel off so that no one will see a microfreighter with a fighter escort, which would attract attention and, apparently, cue the people on the ground that something unusual is happening. We will land at a different field than originally planned. This one is technically not a spaceport, but the Rashidian authorities are waiving that and will let us set down there. It’s a military airfield, well garrisoned. Someone will meet us there and take us where we need to go.”
“Why approach from the sea?”
“It’s hard to hide a portable surface to air missile launcher or pulse cannon on the surface of the ocean. You have to put it on a ship or a boat, and those have been cleared from our flight path.” As the two men were talking, Max had steered the ship through a series of turns and descents. In a few minutes, just before they crossed the coast, the fighter escort peeled off, the leader wagging his wings as they departed, a fact reflected by a similar motion of the icon representing the fighter on Max’s proximity display. Before Sahin knew it, with a gentle bump, the Clover was on the ground.
After a few moments to equalize pressure, the hatch cycled and opened outward with a clunk and a hiss. The doctor was standing at the hatch when the first glimpse of the outside became visible. “But . . . it is dark,” he blurted indignantly.
“I noticed. The phenomenon is technically known to planetary scientists as ‘night.’ I hear that it happens on a regular basis around here.”
“Do not be obtuse.” He practically stomped his foot with uncharacteristic petulance. “I mean that it is dark when it should be light. I programmed my wrist chrono for the rotational period of Rashid IV and set it for the local time at Amman where we were to meet Mr. Wortham-Biggs. I was expecting it to be 13:42 standard time, which is the middle of the afternoon, in Amman’s time zone. But it is fully dark.”
They stood in the hatch which was about three meters off the ground and waited for the Clover to extend its embarkation ramp, a process that took a little more than two minutes.
“That is because we did not land at Amman, but at Harun, the planet’s capital city, to confuse anyone who might be planning to do us harm in Amman. Local time here is seven hours later than at Amman. Mr. Wortham-Biggs took a suborbital shuttle and is already at the meeting site. We’re going to be taken by ground car, just like ordinary off-world trade delegates, to the Ministry of Trade building, where we will have our meeting.”
“When did you obtain that valuable intelligence and why did you not inform me? It is not as though I am along solely as a passenger, you know.”
“Yarmouk Four and I talked about it on an open comm with you sitting right beside me.”
The doctor harrumphed. “It must have been after I had been rendered insensate by listening to several minutes of ‘descend on a niner delta gradient to angles five zero and come right to two niner zero at mop two-point-seven’ and similar incomprehensible pilot-ese. It is a wonder that I am thinking well enough to be able to speak with you right now rather than standing here with a blank stare on my face and saliva running down my chin.”
Max shook his head dejectedly. He knew he was wasting his breath, but he said it anyway. “Bram. That ‘angels’ and ‘mach.’”
“Aha! I have finally caught you in an error in your ridiculous pilot jargon. You said ‘angels’ when you meant ‘angles.’”
Max could not keep from scowling slightly. Accepting correction when he was wrong was difficult enough, but being corrected when he was right truly tested his patience. “No. I said ‘angels’ when I meant ‘angels.’ ‘Angels’ is the pilot shorthand for ‘thousand meters above the ground’ as opposed to a thousand meters along the ground or in any other direction. Because angels occupy the heavens.”
“No matter.” If Max was waiting for a show of contrition from Sahin, he could go on waiting. “You might as well have said houris and Bach for all I care. It is all nonsense. You know, I am rather put out by all of this. I should have liked to have received this disappointing news in a less abrupt fashion.”
“Disappointing news? What’s so disappointing about having the meeting here rather than in Amman?”
“Because if we are meeting Mr. Wortham-Biggs at a government office rather than in his private stud
y, the coffee will not be nearly as good.”
Max chuckled inwardly. Coffee my ass. Ibrahim Sahin was clearly hoping to spend a few moments with Wortham-Biggs’s perfectly lovely daughter. According to Spacer Fahad, who had attended the first meeting between the doctor and Wortham-Biggs, a blind man could have seen the sparks flying between the young lady and Bram for the few moments they had been together.
By this time the ramp had extended and a small party had gathered at its foot. Max and the doctor, each carrying a small, anonymous-looking duffle, descended to meet them. Two of the men were in Rashidian Air Force uniforms, which looked vaguely like 21st Century British Air Force uniforms. Ten more were dressed as were Max and Sahin, in the kind of medium brown and tan flowing robe of the kind worn by virtually everyone on Rashid IV who did not have a specific reason to wear something else. The man with the more elaborate uniform and, apparently, the higher rank of the two, approached Max when he reached the bottom of the ramp. He was a handsome man, a bit taller and broader than Max, wearing the kind of thin, closely trimmed beard that seemed to be the style on this world, who looked to be just on the near side of sixty. He had a bearing that Max was accustomed to seeing in highly effective senior officers. Max would have bet he was the base commander.
“Good evening, gentlemen,” he said. “I am Colonel Mubarek and this is my Executive Officer, Major Hassam. You are Captain Robichaux?”
“That’s correct, Colonel. I’m Max Robichaux. This is my Chief Medical Officer, Lieutenant Ibrahim Sahin. He is also acting Union Ambassador to the Kingdom.” The Colonel shook hands with both of them in the manner common in the Union, although hand shaking was not the custom on Rashid IV.
“Very pleased to meet the both of you,” said the Colonel. “Please forgive me for not introducing these other gentlemen, but they are in a profession in which their names are not the subject of casual discussion. Please also forgive us for the disruption of your visit by certain lawless elements. We will do everything possible to prevent further incidents of the kind. Now, let us attend to your transportation to the Ministry of Trade.”
For Honor We Stand Page 8
