I paused for effect.
"The good news is, they appear to be a long way behind us technologically speaking. We don’t know about weapons yet, but their sensors are practically useless, and their ships appear to be slow by our standards. But this is small comfort. As of an hour ago, they had already deployed ONE MILLION fighter sized ships. And that was in less than a quarter hour of deployment."
I paused again, and looked around the Bridge. And back to the cam.
"I say this to all Government and Military leaders on this side of Earth. Start evacuating the furthest ends of your space now. Latin sector leaders, you have the least time. While the African sector can flee through the Egypt system, your escape route is Brazil, and the Brazil system could be under attack in as little as eighteen days if we are unable to slow them down. This is not a joke. This is real. Anyone on the Latin sector side of Brazil in twenty one days, could be there for the rest of their very short lives. I'm not exaggerating. And it could be sooner. Sectors on the other side of Earth, you have longer, but do the math."
I took a breath.
"I'm ordering all Hunter ships to go to worst case scenario orders. I suggest all other forces do the same. This is worse than I ever imagined. You all get some time. If we have their speed right, they'll be in the War system in about five days, and that’s where you need to make them hurt."
I could see some worried looks now. I think a few of them had an idea of where I was going.
"We're going in."
Alarmed looks replaced concerned ones.
"I have no choice. The Battleship they are using for shields must be destroyed. The best time to do it is now, especially while it's more vulnerable after unloading. We'll stay in touch as long as we can. If we fail, senior officers at each fleet location take command. You'll see the advance by when the comnavsats go down. Make them bleed. Hunter out."
I looked at Jane.
"Attach your modified nav files and the specs for everyone else, and send it off as soon as you can."
"Confirmed. Matter of minutes."
"Get us moving. Maximum speed until we come to about ten thousand kilometers of the lead elements, and drop down to something about twice their speed. I want to appear faster than they are, but not give them our true speed."
"Confirmed."
BigMother started accelerating. Without nav or HUD, this was a bit scary. I turned to Annabelle.
"General, I hate to do this to you all, but…"
"You want us suited up," interrupted BA.
"Yes. I seriously regret only having two teams on board. But we'll have to make do with combat droids and Jane's suits. Prepare to repel boarders. We have no idea what they'll do when we get in range, and they may go for capturing the first ship they come across."
"They'll know our capabilities from the Battleship," said George.
"Maybe not," answered Dick. "They seemed to have used the shielding effectively, but they should have seen her engines as a gift, and used the design in their own ships."
"Too many to upgrade so fast," added Alana.
"Or maybe the Battleship was damaged by the time they took it," said Agatha, "and they never saw its top speed."
"We can but hope," I said.
"Plan boss?" asked George.
"We make a straight run on the position of the Battleship, which should still be close by the jump point. We don’t stop for anything, and hope speed will keep them from hitting us too hard. We hit it with everything we've got, and keep hitting it until it's destroyed. That should stop them bringing in more ships."
"And if they do hit us hard on the way?" asked Grace.
"Perhaps today is a good day to die."
There was silence.
I turned to the cam operator and the other media people.
"It will take us about four hours to get within striking distance. I suggest you all get some rest and food before we get there. Jane will leave extra comnavsats behind us so your commentary and cam feed will go out live. It's vitally important you capture everything, as it will be all anyone else gets in the way of warning about their capabilities. Amy, sort out a roster, so someone is always here and continuing to comment."
"On it boss."
I rose from my chair, but Jane shot me a look, and I sat again. She waved a vid to a screen.
"Admiral Hunter and the crew of BigMother." It was Marshal Bigglesworth. "You had us worried there for a while, but we're glad you're okay. Your feeds and data are coming through to the whole spine. I speak for all humanity when I say we wish you were not there alone. Godspeed. All our hopes ride with you."
He paused for a moment.
"Ka-Plaa!"
The vid ended.
"What did that last bit mean?" asked one of the media people.
"Success," said Amy.
"Why are we here alone?" asked another one.
"We're the only ship with the shielding to take on a fight and Pestilence at the same time."
"Are you sure?" asked the cam operator.
"We're about to find out," opined BA, on her way out.
I followed her, and for the first time in two weeks, went to my suite.
Five
Angel was asleep on my bed with Max and Nut. They'd missed the whole thing. I stripped off, and stepped into the shower. If we were going to our end, I'd be going clean. I stood there in the hot water and tried to think of nothing at all.
Aline stepped in behind me, and started soaping me down. Neither of us said a word, while we washed, dried, and crashed onto the bed, making cats jump away hurriedly, who shot out to find somewhere safer to sleep. As I've always said, everyone should have one last good bonk before they go. I'm not sure Angel would agree it was worth waking her up for.
Several hours later, Jane announced I had emails to look at.
"Is this really a suicide mission Jon?" asked Aline, before I could move to get up.
"Hard to say."
"Do you mean you have a problem saying it, or you don’t know?"
"Both."
"Odds?"
"Not good. We have to hope our shielding will hold long enough to get us to the target."
"And if it doesn’t?"
"We'll never know."
She went silent as I slipped off the bed, and padded back to the shower. Of course she followed me in, and we did the whole soap, wash, and dry cycle again.
We still had a couple of hours before crunch time arrived, so I settled in the living room.
"Pizza my Lord?" asked Jeeves.
"Please."
"Me too," said Aline.
"Yes Ma'am."
"I wish he'd stop calling me that," she said, as Jeeves disappeared into the kitchen.
I laughed. I'd never been able to get Jeeves to stop calling me Lord.
"Emails," reminded Jane.
I pulled my pad out. There were a dozen short emails wishing me the local military equivalent of success. Mum had sent me the 'Grace of the Valar', which confused me because I'd never realized she'd ever watched any of that. Dad had said to do everyone proud. Miriam told me I'd better make it back, or she'd drag me back from hell, and kill me herself.
But it was the email from David which stopped me short. It had one word, and a vid. The word was 'Tarantara'. I threw the vid to the wall as Jeeves brought in our pizza. Angel came over to sniff at it, but decided it wasn’t suitable cat food. She started batting a mouse around.
I'd seen this one. It was an excerpt of the production of the local Gilbert and Sullivan society, about two months before I’d left Gaia the first time. The production was the Pirates of Penzance, and the excerpt was from early in the second act.
I couldn’t stop myself singing along to the male chorus lines, and was surprised when Aline sang the female chorus lines. For a brief time, we forgot where we were heading.
"Well," I said when it ended, "at least someone thinks we might make it through."
"How do you work that out?"
"The copp
ers survived."
"And we're the coppers?"
"Of course."
A strange look came over her face. But she laughed it off. We finished our pizza, had desserts, and I finished reading emails.
I was back on the Bridge an hour before I’d told everyone to be there.
"Sitrep," I said to Jane, who was the only one there, other than a single bored looking media type.
"I'm still refining the nav code. It no longer crashes, but a million dots won't mean anything, and whatever might be important will be lost in the mess."
There was a dead reckoning chart up where the navmap should have been. It showed where we were, and where the enemy ships were expected to be. At this speed, we were a bit over an hour away, but I intended to slow down before we came too close to them.
I started reconfiguring the firing controls on my chair. It had been a while since I'd needed to use them myself, and they were still set up for single targets. This wasn't going to work now. We needed as much bang for our buck as we could get. I oriented all the turrets which could fire forward, to a wide firing pattern across the front width and depth of the ship, so that when each size of gun fired, we'd get a wall of pulses ahead of us sufficient to blast a hole for the ship to fly through. I also had Jane set up to have the capital ship missile launchers do the same thing. The remaining turrets were assigned to a fire-control version of a Jane clone, which also controlled the Point Defense turrets. The Mosquito launchers were individually controlled by medium AI versions of Jane already.
"We're back," said Jane, with a note of triumph in her voice.
The HUD and navmap came up again, and I could see we were exactly where Jane had dead-reckoned us to be. But the enemy ships were not. They were further away from us than she'd expected.
"Is that position for the lead elements right?"
"Confirmed. This is real time from the nearest comnavsat to them. They've destroyed all the ones we left close to the jump point now, so we have no way of knowing what's going on there."
"Have you sent the software update off to everyone else?"
"Yes. As you can see, I've designated them as enemy now. But I've doubled the size of the dots, to indicate these are big groups of ships. It'll scale when we're closer, so each red dot means less, but we'll get more dots then. At the moment, each dot means fifty thousand ships."
The mind totally boggled. I mean, knowing it and believing it were two incompatible things. The number was also showing in the pop up on the HUD for each dot.
The team was dribbling back onto the Bridge now, along with the media people. Thirteen appeared next to me, and I flinched.
"I wish you wouldn’t do that!"
"Sorry. I still forget you can see me now."
"Can't you materialize somewhere alone, and walk onto the Bridge like everyone else?"
"Where's the fun in that?"
I sighed.
"Are you sure we don’t have another option?"
"Like?"
"Going back in time, and being at the jump point when they emerge?"
"We’ve done that already."
"It didn’t work?"
"No."
"What exactly didn’t work?"
"First time, we were waiting at the jump point itself. We got in two major broadsides before we collided."
I flinched.
"The next three times were all repeats, except we were further away each time. After that we started much further away. Then it was the massed fighters which took us out before we could even get to the core. The further back we started, the longer the action took, but we always faced too many ships to survive long enough."
"What's different about where we waited this time?"
"You specified it. It's from your nightmare. How does it look to be shaping now?"
I looked really hard at the navmap.
"They are spreading out over a wide arc. By the time we reach them, the number of ships which can fire on us immediately will be substantially less than if we'd started closer."
"Exactly. Hence the position given in your nightmare. I suspect anywhere closer results in our destruction and the survival of the core."
"But are we close enough now?" asked George, now back in the Helm seat. "I mean, the core has been unloading ships the last four hours. Is it even still there?"
Thirteen flickered.
"It's still there. But it's much smaller in size now. I think we get one pass only, maybe two before it jumps back out again.
"Figures."
Six
"Jon," said Aline. "Do you have any other entertainment lined up while we wait? I don’t know about anyone else, but I need a distraction."
"You hated my last offering."
"I've got something," said Lacey, from his ship. "If you all don’t mind some live singing?"
"Go for it," said BA, before I could say anything.
Lacey's suit changed, to an ancient blue uniform with a strange hat on his head. Victorian bobby? The original 266 pilots, Brown, Jones, Taylor, and Williams, popped up as well, also wearing the same uniforms.
"When the foeman bares his steel," sang Lacey in a surprisingly good voice.
"Tarantara! tarantara!" sang the other four, now sounding like a barbershop quintet.
The sounding was Tar-an-ta-ra.
"What the hell is that?" interrupted Grace.
Angel was looking at the screens in amazement.
"Pirates of Penzance, early in Act Two." I said.
"Shut-up and listen," said BA.
Lacey and the guys restarted.
When the foeman bares his steel,
Tarantara! tarantara!
We uncomfortable feel,
Tarantara!
And we find the wisest thing,
Tarantara! tarantara!
Is to slap our chests and sing,
Tarantara!
For when threatened with émeutes,
Tarantara! tarantara!
And your heart is in your boots,
Tarantara!
There is nothing brings it round,
Like the trumpet's martial sound,
Like the trumpet's martial sound
Tarantara! tarantara!,
They now broke into two groups, with the three pilots singing the baritone part…
Tarantara! tarantara!
Tarantara! tarantara!
Tarantara! tarantara!
Tarantara! tarantara!
Tarantara! tarantara!
Tarantara, ra, ra,
Tarantara!
While Lacey and Brown sang the bass part…
Ra, ra, ra, ra,
Ra, ra, ra, ra,
Ra, ra, ra, ra,
Ra, ra, ra, ra,
Ra, ra, ra, ra,
Tarantara, ra, ra,
Tarantara!
Agatha stood, and her suit had changed into an ankle length white cotton nightdress, with puffed long sleeves, with lace and frills. She opened her mouth to sing the next bit.
Go, ye heroes,
Go to glory,
Though you die in combat gory,
Ye shall live in song and story.
Go to immortality!
Go to death, and go to slaughter;
Die, and every Cornish daughter
With her tears your grave shall water
Go, ye heroes, go and die!
Alana, Alison, Aline, and to my surprise, BA, stood now, also in nightdresses.
Go, ye heroes, go and die!
Go, ye heroes, go and die!
Though to us it's evident,
Tarantara! tarantara!
These attentions are well meant,
Tarantara!
Such expressions don't appear,
Tarantara! tarantara!
Calculated men to cheer
Tarantara!
Who are going to meet their fate
In a highly nervous state.
Tarantara! tarantara! tarantara!
Still to us it's evident
These attentions are well meant.
Tarantara! tarantara! tarantara!
The girls sat, leaving BA standing.
Go and do your best endeavour,
And before all links we sever,
We will say farewell for-ever.
Go to glory and the grave!
The girls stood again.
Go to glory and the grave!
For your foes are fierce and ruthless,
False, unmerciful, and truthless;
Young and tender, old and toothless,
All in vain their mercy crave.
The girls sat again.
We observe too great distress,
On the risks that on us press,
And of reference a lack
To our chance of coming back.
Still, perhaps it would be wise
Not to carp or criticise,
For it's very evident
These attentions are well meant.
Yes, it's very evident
These attentions are well meant,
Evident, yes, well meant, evident
Ah, yes, well meant!
The men then started in on the main refrain again, while the girls sang theirs over the top, two to a part.
Men:
When the
foeman bears his steel, Taranta-
ra! tarantara! We un-
comfortable feel. Taranta-
ra! And we
find the wisest thing, Taranta-
ra! tarantara! Is to
slap our chests and sing Taranta-
ra! For when
threatened with émutes, Taranta-
ra! tarantara! And your
heart is in your boots,Taranta-
ra! There is
nothing brings it round, Like the
trumpet's martial sound, Like the
trumpet's martial
sound, Tarantara, taranta-
ra, Tarantara, taranta-
ra, tarantara, taranta-
ra, tarantara, taranta-
ra, tarantara, taranta-
ra, ra, ra, ra,
ra, ra, ra, taranta-
ra, tarantara, tarantara!
Agatha and BA:
Go, ye heroes,
Hunter Legacy 12: Hero in Darkness Page 3
