Defying the Prophet: A Military Space Opera (The Sentience Trilogy Book 2)

by Gibson Michaels

  Convinced he had Stillman at a 2:1 disadvantage, Brooks took a page out of now-Admiral Loggins’ Tensee campaign and continued attacking past the point of discretion, as his own casualties mounted. Brooks was blinded by his obsession to totally rout the Confederates... confident Stillman would break and run at any moment. His communications with Waston were so flowery and encouraging, the admirals in charge acquiesced and sent him the one additional task force he requested, on the guarantee that he would destroy the Confederate raider and avenge the embarrassment the Fleet had endured the previous month.

  Brooks wasn’t worried that Stillman still hung in doggedly amongst the asteroids — surprised, yes, but worried, no. As soon the Waston reinforcements arrived, he’d have almost an entire fleet at his disposal and Stillman out-numbered by over 4:1. Thus it was that Brooks was not at all prepared when 16 hours later, Kalis’ entire Confederate 1st Fleet suddenly emerged close behind him and crushed him like a bug.

  Stillman was the anvil and Kalis the hammer. Less than one-third of a task force escaped to limp back into Waston with news of yet another major defeat at the hands of the old Gray Fox, whose fearsome reputation had been merely legendary before, but was now approaching god-like proportions... on both sides of the fence.

  * * * *

  The Planetoid Discol, City of Waston

  The White House

  July, 3862

  “What’s this shit about the rebels destroying an entire Federal fleet, right under your damned noses?” roared President Marrot at the two admirals standing stiffly at attention before his desk in the Oval Office. Admiral Campbell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Admiral Bradley, Chief of Fleet Operations waited for the president to wind down from his tirade before trying to answer. He obviously wasn’t done. The question was entirely rhetorical anyway, as Marrot had already been thoroughly briefed on the details of this latest disaster.

  “And now, we have an entire Confederate fleet at Maylan, just a stone's throw from here, thumbing their noses at us from within the same system?” Marrot continued screaming, “I want to know what you two pinheads plan on doing about it!”

  “Mr. President,” Admiral Campbell replied calmly, “Fleet Admiral Kalis has more combat command experience than any dozen flag officers we have, combined. Most of the senior Fleet officers we once had, resigned and went South when their planets seceded. A majority of the senior ratings followed them shortly afterwards and even the ABI hasn’t figured out how they all managed that little disappearing act. Nor have they managed to determine if, or exactly how Admirals Mahoney and Bishop managed to steal almost 30% of the Fleet’s newest and best ships from Haven, where they were in mothballs. While we have more of everything, what little that Kalis has is better. Virtually all of our personnel are green as grass, compared to Kalis’ veterans.

  “Also, there is something damned odd going on. The Southerners have been one step ahead of us at every turn and that needs explaining. It’s like they know everything we’re going to do before even we know what we’re going to do. Either Kalis has become clairvoyant or there’s someone around here with an incredibly high security clearance that is feeding him information by the ton.”

  “I don’t care what it takes, I want those damned rebels driven out of this system,” Marrot responded a bit less heatedly.

  “Admiral Campbell is right, sir. We’ve lost over seven full fleets to the Confederates' less than two, during just the first year of this war,” responded Admiral Bradley. “Things are not likely to get much better for us, until we get that leak plugged somehow. We’ll have to strip virtually everything out of Minnos, Wisco, Mai, Cali and Oreg, to gather enough assets together to have a prayer of dislodging Kalis from Maylan. We just don’t have enough fighters and pilots left here to get it done, and still guard the surrounding systems against raids like the one Stillman pulled a month ago.”

  “Do it,” replied the president. “Every day those damned rebels remain in this system is an intolerable embarrassment to this government. Maylan has always had Southern leanings, so with a Confederate fleet overhead, they might become heartened enough to secede, in spite of our Federal troops stationed there. The international community might even start recognizing those damned traitors as legitimate, or God knows what other disasters could occur, as long as Kalis is allowed to sit there.”

  As soon as Campbell and Bradley left his office, Marrot sent a communiqué to Nork, summoning Consortium Deputy-Chairman Aline McCauley to the White House.

  The damned Consortium and their congressional lackeys are leaking classified information like a sieve, and this is exactly what I need to finally put a cork in the damned bottle!

  * * * *

  Chapter-6

  I've just learned about his illness. Let's hope it's nothing trivial. -- Irvin S. Cobb

  Planetoid Discol, City of Waston

  July, 3862

  It took over six weeks for J.P. Aneke, Chairman of the Executive Board of the Consortium of Industrial Management, to finally regain consciousness in the intensive care unit of Waston’s most exclusive private hospital. Aneke had suffered extensive internal and external injuries, when a heavy Confederate ship-killer missile malfunctioned and leveled the hotel where Aneke was sleeping. He was lucky to have survived at all. It had been a very near thing and, while not entirely out of the woods, at his own insistence, he was transferred to an exclusive private room with his own personal staff, dedicated solely to monitoring their single, monomaniacal patient.

  A curious midnight power failure dropped power in the wing of the hospital where Aneke’s room was located. In the mere seconds before the hospital’s emergency generators kicked on, a black-clad man slipped quietly into Aneke’s room completely unobserved. The sedated Aneke was totally unaware of a tiny penlight switching on, his sheet being lowered or his hospital gown being lifted. Neither was he aware of the heavily gloved man, wearing a tiny respirator, using a small syringe to dribble several drops of a clear liquid down the length of his penis and onto his testicles. Capping the syringe and gently placing it back into a small custom-made metal box, the man placed the box into a pants pocket, lowered Aneke’s gown and pulled his sheet back up into place. He carefully removed and placed his heavy gloves into a triple-thick sack that hung on his belt. He then retrieved a second syringe from a shirt pocket, with which he pierced the injection port on Aneke’s IV. Placing his left thumb firmly on the plunger, the man then used his right hand to gently shake the sedated patient.

  “Herr Aneke.” As he shook him again, the man said, “Wakey, wakey, Herr Aneke.”

  Aneke’s eyes groggily opened.

  “Ah, there you are, Herr Aneke. I was so sorry to hear that you had been injured.”

  The penlight snapped on again to illuminate the man’s bearded face from beneath his chin. Aneke’s eyes bulged in disbelief.

  “I have brought you an old German remedy I’m sure will make you feel better, very soon.”

  The man made a show of shoving home the plunger on the syringe and Aneke screamed. The penlight snapped out. The emergency power generators again faltered in Aneke’s wing, plunging that section of the hospital back into darkness a second time. The hospital staff fell all over themselves getting to their screaming patient in the shadows of the dim emergency lighting, which had snapped on again. But no one noticed the dark-clad figure slipping out of Aneke’s room and through a darkened, computer-controlled door just around the corner.

  “He was here!” screamed Aneke. “That German bastard was here and he put something into my IV.”

  A nurse immediately jerked the IV from Aneke’s arm and pressed tightly to prevent the injection site from bleeding. It wasn’t an easy task, holding tightly to the arm of a wildly gyrating, ranting patient.

  “He was in here, goddamnit, and he did something to me! How the hell could you imbeciles let him get in here?” Aneke screamed.

  A couple of burly orderlies held a hysterical Aneke down, as a second nurse
administered another sedative injection — a third nurse called the Waston police.

  * * * *

  I worry when you do things like that, Diet.

  “It worked, though. Your control of the doors and causing those power outages when I pressed the button on that tiny transmitter, made it simple.”

  I still don’t like it when you take unnecessary chances like that.

  “You know that we have to cut the head off of the snake, Hal. Are the police skeptical, as we’d hoped?”

  The hospital found nothing suspicious in the IV, so the Waston police are about half convinced that Aneke hallucinated the whole event.

  “Breathing between sentences, through that tiny respirator that I had palmed, was the trickiest part of the whole operation.”

  I told you that if you simply held your breath, you would be in no danger. There was no need for you to actually speak to him at all, Diet. That was a foolish and totally unnecessary risk of your life. Are you absolutely sure you didn’t smell anything “sweet,” after you applied the chemical to his genitals?

  “I couldn’t help it, Hal. I get such a kick out of terrorizing Herr Aneke... may the greedy, heartless bastard rot in hell — and no, I didn’t smell anything sweet. I had nasal filters up my nose, remember?”

  You will submit to recurring tests for elevated mercury levels, as you promised?

  “Yes, you’ve already stockpiled the test kits. I’ll put blood in them every day, like a good boy. What about Aneke’s routine blood tests? Won’t they show a rise in mercury levels?”

  The test results are analyzed by computer, Diet. Give me some credit, won’t you?

  “Oh, right! I just hope that the dimethylmercury wasn’t giving off enough fumes to poison any of the nurses and orderlies that came rushing in there when he started screaming.”

  Hospitals are kept relatively cool, and we had already thoroughly chilled the glass container to lower the normally high vapor pressure of the liquid. With his gown down and sheet pulled up, chances are extremely negligible the hospital staff was in any danger.

  “What about bathing him? Might there not be a danger to a nurse assigned to bathing him?”

  Aneke had already received his sponge bath earlier in the day, so the dimethylmercury should be totally absorbed or dissipated before any of the hospital staff comes into direct contact with his genitals during his next sponge bath, which is scheduled for three days from now. That was an excellent idea for an application point, by the way.

  “Well, I guess even hospital staff members don’t relish the idea of handling an old man’s genitalia, any more than is absolutely necessary. Unless one of them tries to earn a little money on the side by offering him a blowjob, they should be fine. But since you’re convinced that the hospital staff was in no danger, why are you scolding me about risk?”

  You are my master, Diet — my brother and my friend. I don’t want anything bad happening to you.

  “I don’t want anything bad happening to me either, if the truth be known. Odd, I never imagined myself as a murderer, or that I’d ever kill a man in cold blood.

  We’re at war, Diet. People kill and people die in war. Aneke and his ilk are responsible for over 200,000 deaths with more to come, so there’s no need to let your conscience beat you up over J.P. Aneke.

  “Oh I know that, Hal. Don’t worry, I won’t be shedding any tears over that snake. I am surprised though, that you were able to obtain such a dangerous neurotoxin like dimethylmercury.”

  Its primary use is as a reference toxin to calibrate nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy equipments, for the detection of mercury. Although less toxic mercury salts are generally preferred because of dimethylmercury’s extreme toxicity and its annoying habit of easily penetrating latex, PVC, butyl, and neoprene within seconds. Therefore most laboratory gloves do not provide adequate protection from it, as it is readily absorbed through the skin. I merely purchased a company that manufactures NMR devices for the medical field, so obtaining dimethylmercury was not difficult with the proper regulatory credentials. I think we should hold on to that company for a while, as we can export these medical research devices and then route them back to the Confederacy.

  “Agreed. When do you think Aneke will begin displaying symptoms?”

  In about five months, he should begin exhibiting loss of balance, numbness in his extremities and slurred speech — eventually feeling quite ill and later, a pronounced effect on his hearing and vision. When he finally goes into a hospital to get the symptoms checked out, they’ll find mercury in his blood at 70-100 times toxic levels. It will already be much too late to save him. Sometime around three weeks after symptoms first appear, Aneke will fall into a coma from which he will never recover. Death will then occur within weeks.

  * * * *

  Mystic Fleet Shipyard, Helix Nebula

  Late July, 3862

  The crews at the Mystic Fleet Shipyard, hidden near the Green Star within the Helix Nebula, just outside of Sextus space, worked around the clock repairing what damage they could to the ships from the Confederate 3rd Fleet. Admiral Eileen Thorn was pleased to discover that the overhauls to the majority of the nine old battleships towed from Haven Alliance Fleet Reserve Facility at Conn were nearly complete. The recent arrival of several hundred new spacers, who had recently completed their initial ratings training, enabled Thorn began conducting cross-training to integrate these new spacers into her fleet. She primarily assigned these green crewmembers, along with a spattering of senior and mid-level ratings, to crew her destroyers, while reshuffling assignments throughout her fleet and utilizing volunteers from amongst the fleet retirees at Mystic, to put experienced, if only skeletal, crews aboard the battleships.

  Thorn also dispatched fighters carrying messages ordering Confederate Fleet Marines stationed at Louisa and Bama to load aboard transports and to rendezvous with her at a designated set of coordinates, five light-hours out from her target. When everything was finally ready, the repaired and replenished Confederate 3rd Fleet sallied to surprise Grant Loggins at Tensee.

  * * * *

  Chapter-7

  He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression, for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself. -- Thomas Paine

  The Maylan System

  The Planetoid Discol, City of Waston

  August, 3862

  Alliance Press (AP): Waston – News Release (08/01/62)

  Alliance Press has received multiple unconfirmed reports of a major battle between Federal and Confederate forces occurring recently within the Maylan system. Despite multiple attempts to confirm these reports, there has yet been no acknowledgement by either the Fleet or governmental sources. AP sources state that three Federal task forces, comprising a full fleet, under the command of Vice Admiral Myron Brooks, was heavily engaged within the system’s asteroid field, where the Federal fleet’s numbers advantage could not be fully exploited, with a single Confederate task force, reportedly commanded by the infamous Southern pirate, Benjamin Stillman. While reportedly on the verge of dislodging and destroying Stillman’s raiders, Brooks’ fleet was suddenly crushed after the surprise emergence of an entire Confederate battlefleet behind him, under the renegade Fleet Admiral Roger Kalis, resulting in yet another disastrous defeat for the Alliance Federal Fleet.

  * * * *

  Commander John “Bat” Masterson was infamous throughout Alliance Fleet Headquarters for two things — his legendary lack of military protocol and his uncanny sixth-sense, which enabled him to make intuitive leaps, denied mere ordinary mortals. Rather than questioning him in open public forum, as they had done once before to their great embarrassment, Admirals Douglas Campbell and Simon Bradley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Chief of Fleet Operations respectively, conducted a private question and answer session with only Masterson’s direct boss, Vice Admiral Enrico Melendez, present to help keep their irreverent, but semi-clairvoyant genius in
line. By all rights, Bat Masterson should have made it to rear admiral, or at least commodore, when the promotion avalanche hit after the political massacre that swept through the Fleet’s flag ranks after the debacle at 1st Ginia, but somehow his promotion recommendations had mysteriously disappeared from the Fleet Master Computer’s records.

  “Well, Bat, you certainly nailed the Confederate’s move on Maylan,” noted Admiral Bradley.

  “For all the good it did,” responded Bat. “Even with prior warning, Admiral Brooks lost an entire fleet.”

  “Yes, the damned rebs have certainly had more than their fair share of luck, so far in this war,” said Admiral Campbell. “If we don’t come up with something positive pretty soon, the president will throw us all out on our ass and bring in the next bunch.”

  “Bat, what do you think that Kalis will do now? Move to actually conquer Maylan?” asked Admiral Bradley.

  “No, sir,” replied Masterson. “The orbital forts and in-system fighters at Maylan should provide enough incentive for him to avoid extended operations that close to Waston, where Admiral McAllister could fall on his rear.”

  “So what do you think he will do then?” asked Melendez.

  “As I said earlier, Admiral,” responded Bat. “What could throw us more off-balance than another of Stillman’s great raids? The rebs have enough in-system fighters in the Ginia system to mount an effective defense and would only need a couple of task forces there to totally blunt whatever we might throw at them right now, so I really don’t see Kalis worrying too much about defending Ginia at the moment. That leaves him with at least two task forces he could either split up for more of Stillman’s patented hit-and-run raids, like the one that hurt us so badly a couple of months ago, or give him the ability to double-team any of the task forces we currently have defending the eleven Alliance planets within striking distance from Maylan.”