Rita Longknife - Enemy Unknown: Book I of the Iteeche War (Jump Point Universe 5)

by Mike Shepherd

  “I think I’d better take full responsibility for this one, sir. Your credit in her eyes is way too low. She might show up here tonight with her shotgun.”

  “And I’m a lot bigger target than the clay pigeons she shoots at the lake, huh?”

  “Pretty much sir. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I don’t have any time to waste in chit chat.”

  “A good man?” Ray asked once they were alone again.

  “One of the best. He’s past retirement. My mail clerk tells me he’s had a couple of dozen job offers at double his pay. I’d hate to lose him.”

  “If Rita’s right, I doubt you’ll be able to beat him off with a stick,” Ray said with a grin.

  “Thank God we’ve got men like him,” the admiral said.

  Ray stopped by the Ministry of Exploration only long enough to check on the progress of the search for more scout cruisers. He found that Helvetica had coughed up a cruiser. He’d never expected that planet of bankers and farmers to contribute anything. Maybe the word was getting around.

  It was just before dinner at Nuu House that he finally got taken aside, into the library, for some time with Ernie.

  “Who are those people?” Ray said as he settled onto the couch at the end next to Ernie’s favorite chair.

  The industrialist just shook his head. “A few I’ve met, when I had business dealings on one of the seven sisters. I have had to go back to Earth’s first colonies to get some of the heavy machinery I needed, though I tried to pay as I went. The rest were people I heard about, sometimes in whispers. I was shocked to see them all the way out here. You have got the attention of some serious power, Ray.”

  “I’m not sure I care.”

  “Oh, you care. You better care. If you’ve persuaded them that this is real, you better believe it’s going to make your job a whole lot easier.”

  “Did I?” Ray asked. “Do I and Rita have their attention?”

  “They’re not sure. I can tell you that if this turns out to be a hoax, some people are going to wish they’d never been born.”

  “You and me included?” Ray asked.

  “I hope not. I think they took you for sincere and concerned, but looking for proof. They liked that. They’re concerned, but want more proof.”

  “Don’t we all,” Ray said. “But Ernie, I have to tell you. While half of me hopes Rita finds proof, there’s a whole big half of me that hopes this is just some guy’s idea of a joke on all of us.”

  The old man sighed. “You and me both, son, you and me both.”

  Chapter 31

  Captain Rita Nuu Longknife stared at the wreckage floating above the table in the Exeter’s wardroom. Another time and she would have held this meeting in her day cabin, but Alex was showing his disapproval of all the zero gee by being very cranky today.

  That kid had powerful lungs and he was putting them to good use.

  For a moment, Rita wished that her worst problem was a fretful infant.

  “Any idea what ship that wreckage is off of?” Captain Mattim Abeeb asked Captain Ving. Ving now had Abeeb’s beloved ship, the Second Chance while he chauffeured a large science contingent and the much overrated “sniffer” around in the heavy cruiser Northampton.

  In a fight, the range of the heavy cruiser’s 8-inch lasers would be much appreciated.

  The question highest in Rita’s mind was that fight. Has someone started a war and invited me to the first battle?

  “There’s not a lot of wreckage,” Ving said. “What you see is about all we picked up. No bodies for us to try and trace back to somewhere, so no, we don’t know anything for sure.”

  “Have you done a spectral analysis of the wreckage?” Matt asked.

  “We tried, sir,” Captain Ving said, a pained expression on her otherwise lovely face. “but the mass spec went down. I’m sure your crew could have got it up, sir, but we don’t have the scientists and tech types that you had. We’re kind of a thin crew thrown together in a hurry.”

  “No need to apologize,” Rita said. “We’re all having to make do.”

  She turned to Doctor Qin whom she’d had included in the meeting as soon as she was told there was wreckage recovered and it would be coming aboard for this meeting. “Do you think you can get anything out of the make-up of these scraps?”

  “That’s not my area of specialization,” the sniffer wizard said. “But I know a couple of people you have aboard the Exeter who might,” and she tapped her commlink, spoke briefly, and then folded her hands in a near Buddha display of patience.

  They didn’t have to wait long. In little more than a minute, the wardroom door was pushed open and three young people in white lab coats, two men and a woman, shot in.

  They expertly grabbed a landing on wardroom chairs, but did not pull themselves down to a seat.

  “You called, Doctor,” the young woman said.

  “These officers would like to know where these bits of metal and fabric came from. Human space or not.”

  The three of them eyed the floating scraps. “Give us three hours,” the woman said, “and we’ll give you a ninety percent probability of what planet they’re from. Maybe even what factory.”

  “Tell us as soon as you can if they are of human origin, or from where the other wreckage came from,” Rita said.

  With a nod of understanding, the three caught up the wreckage in netting they’d brought for the purpose, and zoomed out of the wardroom.

  Once the wardroom door closed, Rita turned to Matt and Dr. Qin. “Is there anything more you’d care to share about your study of the other side of this jump?”

  “The official report pretty much said it all. Yes, there was reaction mass on that other side. Yes, it seemed to be from sea water. There was a lot of sodium. Enough that we’d say it was an older world, one where a lot of salt had been washed into the sea, although it could just be a world with a lot of available sodium. Hard to be sure,” Matt said, glancing at Qin.

  The doctor shrugged off the uncertainty.

  “There’s a clear trail to the most distant jump,” Matt added. “We didn’t try to back track it through that jump. Until we know more about the situation, I’m not eager to poke my nose through an unfamiliar jump. Are you?”

  “I think we’re going to be using a lot of jump buoys for cat’s whiskers in the immediate future,” Rita said. “We shot up one of their ships. They shot up one of ours. I wonder if anyone got off a message to back home?”

  “I haven’t noticed that pirates were much in the fashion of talking. A demand of ‘Stand and deliver,’ but not much else,” Matt said.

  “Yes,” Rita agreed.

  They went over the immediate jump area. What stars they’d visited. Which ones they’d skipped for lack of time. Rita brought Hesper in on this part of the discussion. There were plenty of stars in this immediate area to look in on.

  Rita decided those stars could wait until further notice.

  Matt asked her about their study of the wreckage around this jump point. Rita shrugged. “It’s alien. We did do a mass spec on the metal and it doesn’t match anything from human space. The boffins suspect it’s from a totally different ancient supernova.”

  Matt frowned at Rita.

  “The stars and planets in most of human space were spawned from the dust of an earlier exploding star. There’s a kind of faint fingerprint on most of our atoms. Even if you have never been to Earth, you are made from the same star dust. This metal, not so much. Not even close.”

  Doctor Qin jumped in. “Their iron isn’t quite the same as our iron. It has a different ratio of isotopes. It’s the same with the sodium we’re picking up from their reaction mass. It would never pass as the salt that turned Earth’s ocean bitter. No, they are from several hundred, maybe a thousand light years apart.

  Matt whistled. “So, we’ve got ourselves some aliens.”

  “Definitely,” Qin said.

  “Have you got anything from their electronics?” Matt asked. “A Nav computer, maybe?”
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  “No such luck,” Rita said. “Though I’m not sure we’d recognize it if we were hit between the eyes with it.”

  “We’ve found bits of electronic equipment,” Dr. Qin jumped in to add. “I think we have parts of some radios. Maybe some stuff that was their computational equipment, but they’re in such a mess,” she said, with a look of distaste. “This ship was really shot up. If there was a bridge, it’s lost.”

  “The reactors?”

  “They did not go off catastrophically,” Rita said, “Or we’d be looking at just a few scraps like we have for the ship you found, Captain Ving. But now, it will take some recovery work to figure out how they run their reactors, and we don’t have that kind of instrumentation with us. No, if we really want to study this wreck, we’ll have to come out here with a couple of big freighters and cart the whole of it back home.”

  A bit later, Dr. Qin’s commlink buzzed. She answered it, and put it on speaker for all. A young woman’s voice was almost breathless from excitement.

  “It’s human all right. We’re betting it’s from Savannah. Likely a Daring class light cruiser from a bit of wiring we’ve analyzed. It’s part of a 6-inch laser.”

  Rita noted the flicker of raised eyebrows among the Navy officers around the table.

  “Tell us when you have finished,” Dr. Qin said, and tapped off.

  “Something shot up a Daring class light cruiser,” Matt said. He’d commanded a City class merchant conversion to light cruiser during the last war. He’d faced laser fire from a few Darings. There was respect in his voice, and maybe a touch of fear.

  “We don’t know for sure,” Rita said, and ticked off several thoughts in rapid succession. “If they were on an exploration voyage, there’s no telling how well their laser battery was manned or their gunners trained. They also could have been caught by surprise, like the pirate and this alien ship were.”

  Rita noted how easily “alien ship,” had slipped into her vocabulary.

  Ving was shaking her head. “Sorry, Rita, but this ship was shot out of orbit by a ship that it must have known was on an approach course for quite a long time.”

  Rita winced at being caught in such a clear mistake.

  Matt came to her defense. “A ship on approach is just a ship. That the ship will open fire without warning will come as a surprise no matter how long you knew it was coming.”

  Ving listened but shook her head. “Captain Nuu, you interrogated the pirate. He said it was a big, round sphere. Would any of us let something that looks totally alien sail up to us without getting ready to defend ourselves?”

  That thought bounced around the room for a long moment.

  “What does my husband like to say,” Rita finally said. “How willing are they to close with sharp steel? How much do they want to fight? The Unity War is over, right? If we see a ship approaching us, we assume it means us no harm. That it’s not going to fire on us. Now? Not so sure.”

  Heads nodded.

  “Damn those pirates,” Rita said.

  “Damn this mess,” Matt said. “It’s lousy for business.”

  That got a chuckle from Rita. It was rare that she remembered that Matt had spent most of his life running freight from one planet to another, trying to make a profit on unscheduled routes.

  Likely, it would be a long time before he got back to a ship where the worse worry was keeping his bottom line in the black.

  Qin’s commlink buzzed again. Again, she put it on speaker. “It’s a lock,” the voice at the end said. “It’s a Daring class cruiser from Savannah. One likely built about three years ago during the build up to the war. The wire’s not quite as up to specs as the early production wire. But it’s human for sure and Savannah by better than 96%.”

  Rita took a deep breath. “We’ve got about as much information for the folks back on Wardhaven as we’re going to get. Hesper, prepare to get under way. Set a course for Wardhaven, 1.25 gees if you please.”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “Now, at least Alex will be happy,” Rita said. Then she rested her elbows on the table, leaned forward and rested her eyes on the palms of her hands. When she spoke, it was to her wrists.

  “One of our pirates has destroyed an alien ship with a thousand people crammed into it. Another alien ship has destroyed a ship from one of our best light cruiser classes. Am I missing anything?”

  Nobody said anything. Nobody needed to. She had said it all. She’d missed nothing. Whether humanity or the aliens knew it or not, they were drifting backwards into a war.

  The first galactic war.

  The thought made Rita want to weep, but she couldn’t. She commanded a warship in space. Warship skippers never wept.

  Coming Attractions

  In 2016 I amicably ended my twenty-year publishing relationship with Ace, part of Penguin Random House. In 2017, I will begin publishing through my own independent press, KL & MM Books.

  I have high hopes of bringing a lot of fun stories to you in 2017, and then again in 2018 and 2019.

  We have already started the year with Kris Longknife’s Replacement. It was published as an e-book January 5, 2017 at Amazon, (with a bit of a learning experience for me) B&N, D2D, Kobo and the iStore.

  Audible has agreed to produce an audio book as well as all the novels for this year. The exact date is to be announced. Later in the summer, I hope to produce a trade paperback of the first three books.

  Kris Longknife’s Replacement tells the story of Grand Admiral Sandy Santiago as she discovers whether a mere mortal can fill a Longknife’s shoes. Especially Kris Longknife’s shoes. Sandy has problems galore: birds, cats, vicious alien raiders. Oh, and she’s got Rita Longknife as well!

  February has this novelette coming at you. Kris Longknife among the Kicking Birds was part of KL Unrelenting. However, it went long and these four chapters had to be cut. I hope you enjoy them now.

  Rita Longknife - Enemy Unknown is the first book of the long awaited Iteeche War series. It will be out in e-book March 1, 2017 from your favorite source. Audible and trade paperback to follow.

  Rita has had enough of Ray Longknife gallivanting around the universe. No sooner is little Al born, than ships start disappearing. Is it pirates, or something more sinister? Rita gets herself command of a heavy cruiser, some nannies and heads out see what there is to see.

  April will have another short offering. Kris Longknife’s Bad Day. You just knew when Kris asked for a desk job that she’d have days like you have at the office. Well, here’s one that will bring you up to day on the technical developments in the Royal US Navy, as well as bureaucratic issues. In the first draft of Emissary, this was the opening chapters but I found a better opening and this got cut. Enjoy!

  Kris Longknife - Emissary begins an entirely new story arch for Kris. It will be out in e-book May 1, 2017 from all your favorite sources.

  Here is the story of what it takes to get Kris out from behind a desk. And for those of you betting in the pool, you’ll get your answer. More I cannot say.

  June will have Abby Nightingale’s view of things around Alwa as Kris Longknife’s Maid goes on Strike. You knew sooner or later this was going to happen.

  July 2, 2017 will see another book set in Alwa as Kris Longknife’s Relief, Sandy Santiago, continues to battle aliens of various persuasions and not a few humans.

  September 3, 2017, Rita Longknife - Enemy in Sight will resolve the unknowns left by Enemy Unknown as humanity slips backwards into a war it does not want and may not be able to win.

  November 5, 2017, Kris Longknife - Admiral will see Kris up to her ears in warships, enemy and friendlies maybe not so friendly as battlecruisers square off against battlecruisers. A fight where both sides are equal is a bloody fight that often no one wins. In Admiral, that is exactly what Kris faces.

  Each month that a book isn’t published, a short story or something from the cutting room floor, a scene that had to be cut from an overly long book will be published. Most will sell for $.99, like
Ruthie’s wonderful story.

  I have secured the services of Scott Grimando who did the wonderful Kris Longknife covers for Ace to provide the new covers for all the books going forward. It truly will be art to enjoy.

  Stay in touch to follow developments by following Mike Moscoe or Kris Longknife on Facebook or checking in at my website www.mikeshepherd.org.

  I hope to soon have a mailing list you can sign up for, but it’s not there yet.