The Jeraptha were as glad to get off the Kristang destroyer as their hosts were glad to see them go. “That was a pointless exercise, Admiral,” Kartow observed with disgust. “They didn’t inspect anything.”
“A physical inspection may not have been their purpose,” Kekrando mused. “They could have scanned our ship without coming aboard.”
“Then why bother coming aboard?”
“I do not know, Kartow. Perhaps they simply wished to gloat over a defeated enemy,” Kekrando said, misery finally showing on his voice. “I will change out of this uniform,” he looked down at his magnificent apparel. The same uniform he would wear again when he appeared before the clan leadership, in disgrace.
In his cabin, Kekrando changed out of his formal uniform, and back into a plain set of fatigues that were more appropriate for a warrior. The neck of the dress uniform must be too tight, he thought as he pulled the neckline of the fatigues away from his skin and scratched his neck. And scratched it again. It was uncomfortable, he thought of putting a cream on his neck to stop it from-
“Admiral!” The comm system in the wall console alerted him. “We have a problem!”
In the engineering control chamber of the destroyer, one of the reactor engineers was also tugging on the collar of his own formal dress uniform, which he still wore. The admiral had ordered the entire crew to dress formally to receive the Jeraptha, who had not even bothered to enter the back half of the ship! The engineering team had their bots scrubbing and cleaning and polishing every surface, even inside areas that could only be accessed by removing hatches. Bots were not good enough for some chores, the crew had gotten on hands and knees to clean and polish manually. Domestic chores such as cleaning were menial tasks for bots, slaves and females, and humiliating to any Kristang warrior. And after all the painstaking effort, wasted effort, the disgusting, arrogant Jeraptha had not looked at any of the engineering spaces. Had not even glanced at a single missile to assure its warhead detonation device had been removed.
The reactor engineer did not have much to do, as the only active reactor aboard the ship was the small auxiliary power unit. The engineering team had feared the Jeraptha would demand even that relatively weak unit be put in cold shutdown before the destroyer attached to the star carrier, leaving the entire ship relying on backup power. Fortunately, even the Jeraptha understood that the main reactors could not have their containment systems energized by backup power, and allowed the APU to remain online. That is odd, the engineer thought to himself, the console instruments indicated the APU was running slightly warm, despite the coolant system operating perfectly. Then the console shows the temperature of the reactor spiking, and the engineer sniffed the air. Smoke!
The three Jeraptha climbed up the ramp into their dropship. As soon as the ramp was securely closed, two of them dropped the pretense of being inebriated. Blue armband had to help Saksey into a seat, because Saksey, still bitter about losing the wager, had actually filled his squeeze bulb with burgoze. “That was not,” Saksey hiccupped, “not as much fun as it could have been.”
“Be patient, Saksey,” yellow armband assured his crewmate. “I’ll wager in a few minutes, you will think our little trip was well worth our time.”
“Yes!” Blue armband agreed, and the two slapped antennas gleefully.
“I will not take that wager,” Saksey muttered morosely. “It had better be something damned entertaining to brighten up my day.” What he had not mentioned was that he had just lost another bet, a bet about the Kristang admiral’s attire. Saksey had wagered the disgraced Kristang would wear regular shipboard fatigues, to show disdain for, and defiance of, the Jeraptha. He had lost, because Kekrando, indeed every crewman aboard the destroyer, had been wearing full dress uniform.
The dropship was less than halfway back to the star carrier, when they received notice of a potentially serious problem aboard the Kristang flagship. Fire in an auxiliary reactor, the destroyer was preparing to maneuver and possibly eject the reactor core from the ship; all ships in the area were warned to avoid a radioactive explosion. To the confusion of Saksey, his companions were chuckling, then laughing uncontrollably. “We had better,” yellow armband said between gales of laughter, “tell them before they really do eject it.”
“What did you do?” Saksey asked, checking that he was securely held in the seat in case the dropship had to perform emergency maneuvers.
“An old classic, Saksey! Sometimes the best tricks are the simple ones. Smoke bomb in the reactor compartment! We dropped nanobots that crawled through their ventilation system to their engineering spaces. By now, they think the auxiliary reactor is overheating, and the compartment should be filled with smoke. Oh, I wish I could see their ugly faces when they realize it is only a simple smoke bomb!”
Saksey chuckled also, he had to admit that was a good one. “I am glad I did not take your wager. I love messing with the Kristang, they are so gullible.”
“Wait,” blue armband struggled to say, he was laughing so hard, “wait until the admiral discovers the itching powder in his uniform fatigues. Another oldie but goodie! I tell you, when messing with a low-tech species, simple tricks are the best.”
Admiral Kekrando received an all-clear from the destroyer’s captain, who was chagrinned to admit the problem had been only a smoke bomb. A simple practical joke that had the destroyer’s crew less than thirty seconds from ejecting the reactor core, before an engineer discovered the smoke-generating device behind a pipe.
Admiral Kekrando’s acknowledgement was delayed, as he was in the shower, furiously scrubbing his itching skin. And hoping, whatever else fate had in store for him, that he never again had to deal with the Jeraptha.
39 Commando’s Jawkuar completed its long flight, and the pilots set it down as close to the objective as possible. The wings of the Jawkuar bent or broke tree branches, and the belly of the dropship flattened one small tree and several shrubs; that could not be prevented. The commando leader was the first to pop the door open and breath in blessedly fresh air, filling his lungs in great, greedy gulps. To enhance stealth, the air circulation inside the Jawkuar had been kept at a minimum, and the air in the cabin had been stale and increasingly thick with the stink of unwashed Kristang warriors. The commando leader walked down the steps onto the stony, sandy soil; his boots crunched on dried leaf litter from the palm trees which swayed in the steady trade winds.
His second in command walked down to stand beside him. “Ah, that air is a relief. It’s too bad we’re here on a mission; this island would be a pleasant place to relax.”
“Relax? Without females to serve us?” The leader scoffed, but winked at his second. “It is nice,” he said, enjoying the hot sun on his skin. “I will have to remember this place, after we take this planet back from the Ruhar.”
“If we are successful,” the second chuckled, “this island won’t be here.”
“True.” Then the leader snapped out of his brief tropical reverie. “Stealth netting goes up first, then set up jammers and repeaters. Get those trees,” he pointed to the branches broken by the Jawkuar’s descent, “trimmed, and bend some of these palms down to lean over the ship.” The palms were tall enough. “I’m going to inspect the site.” He scuffed away soil with the heel of his boot. “Perhaps fortune will smile on us, and this will be easy.”
“This is a volcanic island,” the second repeated data from the geological survey. “It could be all hardened lava under this sand.”
“If it is,” the leader said sourly, “I will blame your negative thoughts.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
“Got it! Trace reacquired,” the Mem Hertall‘s sensor technician muttered excitedly. He was too tired to shout, having been awake almost continuously while his ship tracked the extremely faint particle trail left by what he was certain was the Kristang frigate To Seek Glory in Battle is Glorious. “Tagging location. Bring us about again,” he advised the duty officer, “we need to triangulate the trace.”
“Bring us about, again,” the duty officer wearily ordered the ship’s helmsman. Again. How many times had they done that already? She could not remember. Even the ship’s computer may have lost track of how many times they had performed the same, repetitive action.
Knowing the duty officer, and the entire crew, were bored out of their minds, the sensor tech stood up, stretched, then announced “Particle density was up another eighteen percent that time. We’re closing.”
The duty officer rose from her chair excitedly. “You are sure?”
The tech pointed to the display. “See for yourself, Ma’am.”
“How close?” The Hertall had been coordinating the search with the Toman and the Grathur. Each of the three ships wanted to do everything they could to find a dangerous enemy. And the crew of each ship wanted their own ship to be the one who found the Glory. So far, the Mem Hertall was significantly in the lead.
The tech rubbed the back of his aching neck. “Close. With this level of particle density, that ship must have significant battle damage. She is spewing out reactor coolant, she has a leaky airlock, and her hull coating is flaking off. From the hull coating alone, the database can be certain we’re tracking our old friend the Glory.”
“Close, like?” The duty officer asked anxiously. The ship was now only on yellow alert, the highest condition of combat readiness that could be sustained for a long period. If combat was imminent, she should take the ship to red alert. Or Captain Rastall, who was sleeping in his cabin next to the bridge, should do that. “Should I notify the captain?”
The sensor tech held up a finger for quiet, as the Hertall crossed the trace cloud from a different direction. “Got it. Up twenty two percent, and the trail is straight as an arrow. Now, you should wake up the captain.”
The Kristang Special Forces warriors of 39 Commando prepared a stealth communications drone. Folded up for deployment, the device was no larger than a walnut shell, but surprisingly heavy as it consisted of tightly packed nanomaterial. The Kristang special forces were in luck that day, or they had been smart enough to wait for the afternoon trade winds to pick up, for a stiff and steady breeze blew out of the west. To launch the stealth drone, two Kristang handled a thin tube that extended out to ten meters’ length. A magnetic impulse launched the walnut, which grew guidance fins after it left the launch tube. When it reached peak altitude at eighteen hundred meters and began to fall, the fins retracted and the outer shell exploded away, revealing a gossamer-thin parachute. At the center of the steerable parachute, the communications drone was a now the size of a lima bean, and encased in a fuzzy stealth field. To wrap even such a tiny object in stealth took enormous power, and the drone’s life was limited to thirteen hours. That was much more time than needed, if nothing went drastically wrong.
The brain of the drone steered the parachute to catch uplifting winds, and avoid downdrafts. It was carried far from the island, climbing higher and higher on soaring thermals, until it reached the point where the air was too thin to provide additional lift. At that point, the parachute material reformed itself into a tall, thin balloon, and the drone filled the balloon with heated hydrogen gas. It climbed rapidly, then its ascent slowed, with the balloon’s envelope expanding as the atmosphere fell away. When the drone judged it could rise no higher, it squirted its message into space on a laser beam with less than two milliseconds duration. Then the drone self-destructed gently into a fine powder. It would take the powder months to fall to the surface, far across the surface of the ocean.
Because the laser beam was initiated so high above the surface, there were few atmospheric particles to create backscatter. Sensors on a Ruhar satellite detected only the faintest trace of a signal, which the sensor network dismissed as most likely being caused by a cosmic ray or micrometeorite.
The laser beam, in the vacuum of space, travelled outward on its lonely journey, encountering only the occasional particle propelled by the solar wind of Paradise’s star. Thirty minutes later, the beam’s strength was still 86% of its original power, well above the 22% needed to be successfully read by a Kristang frigate.
The battered and overworked little frigate Glory had been loitering at the signal rendezvous point, thirty lightminutes from the planet the Kristang knew as Pradassis. The hair-thin laser beam was intercepted by the frigate’s extended sensor field, causing that ship’s captain to congratulate his navigator’s precision. If their position in deep space had been off by as little as the height of a Kristang warrior, they would have missed the signal. The captain privately thought their ability to intercept the signal was a miracle, or luck, rather than precision.
The Glory’s captain read the message and frowned. The ship’s second in command read the message and groaned. “Sir,” the second officer protested quietly, “this will require extremely precise timing. And navigation. To jump into an area this small?” He meant the small sphere of space above Pradassis where the Glory was supposed to rendezvous with the Jawkuar dropship of 39 Commando. “With the poor condition of our jump drive, we would need to jump in close to the planet, then make a second, short jump to the rendezvous point. That is the only way we could have hope of jumping into an area this precise.”
The captain clapped his second officer on the back with hearty Kristang warrior slap. “Ha! You joke, Smando. This ship’s obsolete jump drive could not bring us into these coordinates if we were already there. Krell,” he used a Kristang curse word, “we will be lucky not to emerge from jump inside the damned planet. No matter,” he sighed, “we have our orders. At least we know where and when this mission will end, one way or another.”
“Captain,” Second Officer Smando said with a forced smile. Sometimes his captain’s gallows humor was too much to take. “We will need to hit the rendezvous with a second jump. We will lose the advantage of surprise. 39 Commando will need to fly their Jawkuar directly into our landing bay without delay; we have to jump away within forty seconds.”
“Forty?” The captain raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Thirty seconds, I think. The Ruhar sensor network is still only partly established around Pradassis, but from what little we have been able to observe, their response time is impressive.”
“Thirty seconds?” Smando clenched his teeth. That was impossibly quick.
“Do not worry, Smando,” the captain pounded his underling on the back again. “I have some ideas on how to buy us time. Enough time? Perhaps not. Ah, this ship has tempted fate far too many times already. At this point, the suspense of not knowing when we will die is killing me. Better to get it over with, eh?”
Smando’s lips twisted into a weak grin. “Yes, sir.” He wondered again, for the thousandth time, why he had not taken his father’s advice and requested a nice shore assignment. To seek glory in battle was indeed glorious; it was also dangerous. If he somehow survived his term of service aboard the Glory, he would put his career ambitions aside for a time and simply enjoy being alive. If he lived that long.
It was a long, long flight, mostly over water. The flight was tiring for Irene and Derek, mostly because their flying was constantly criticized by the Ruhar pilots who were flying the lead Buzzard. The criticism was particularly annoying, because for most of the flight, the humans had their Buzzard on autopilot, guided by signals from the lead ship.
“Toonal, fall back 2.27 kilometers, you are crowding me,” called the Ruhar pilot in the lead ship. “And you are low, climb eighteen hundred meters to the glidepath.”
“Asshole,” Irene muttered under her breath and pointed to the main cockpit display that was projected onto the windshield. “We are exactly on the freakin’ glidepath! And point eight kilometers’ separation is textbook flight procedure, for a two-ship formation at this speed and altitude.”
Derek knew nothing he said would soothe his pilot’s anger; he said it anyway. “He’s not unhappy with your flying, he objects that we are humans. Nothing we do will be good enough for him.” Fortunately, the Buzzard had plenty of fuel to reach the island, with
a comfortable safety margin. They would not need to perform inflight refueling until the flight back. At that point in the mission, the giant maser projector would be online, and no one would care how skillfully the humans performed on the return flight. After drilling down to the projector control chamber, there wouldn’t be much for the humans to do. Derek was hoping they would find time to relax on one of the beautiful white sand beaches of the island, and go swimming. He had researched whether swimming in the oceans of Paradise was safe, because there were predators in the water. Each of the humans had a Ruhar device they could wear around their waists that would deter predators, and Nert assured him he was looking forward to swimming. Derek was looking forward to seeing Irene in a bikini. Or less.
Irene cocked her head at her copilot, for him having stated the obvious. “Yeah, like I said, he’s an asshole.” She keyed the console to respond. “Understood, Kiwi, will comply.” She pulled back on the yoke to initiate a climb.
“The lead pilot’s callsign is Kliwa, not Kiwi,” Nert chided her gently from the jumpseat behind her.
“The callsign they gave us is Toonal, that is the baby chick of a bird known for flying awkwardly on your home planet, right?” Irene asked without turning to look at their ‘liaison officer’.
“Yes, that is unfortun- Oh, ha, ha, the translator explained to me that a Kiwi is an Earth bird that is incapable of flying,” Nert giggled. “That is funny.”
“Uh, yes,” Irene regretted being flippant. This mission wasn’t about reactivating another projector, it was about building trust with the Ruhar. Insulting a Ruhar pilot was not a tactic likely to build a positive relationship. “I shouldn’t have said that, sorry.”
Trouble on Paradise: an ExForce novella (ExForce novellas Book 1) Page 13
