Rita Longknife--Enemy in Sight

by Mike Shepherd

“I think so,” Rita said.

  Ray lifted an eyebrow at that answer.

  “I’m back. I like being back,” Rita said. “But I have to tell you, it’s a real high commanding my own warship. And I kind of got a kick out of chasing down all those unknowns. Come on, Ray, tell me you don’t know what it’s like to storm the gates of hell.”

  “Been there, done that. Got a medal on my chest and some metal still in my back. I keep remembering that some woman somewhere told me I’m retired.”

  The three of them shared a laugh at that.

  “But yes,” Ray continued, “I know what it’s like to finish a tough job well done. Now, from where I’m standing, we got a tough job ahead of us. A job involving too damn many meetings and memos and budgets, but a job that needs doing. Shall we?” he said, and stood aside for Rita to enter their office.

  A large screen on the left wall showed the star map they’d been studying since her return. Rita glanced at it, but found nothing new jumping out at her. She noticed a new desk in the office. It was huge, easily the size of two, and had space for chairs on both sides so they could sit facing each other. One got a view of the window and the sky outside, the other got a view of the wall with the door.

  “Which chair do you want?” Rita asked.

  “I figure if you take the chair with the window view, you’ll have a view and I’ll have a view of you. We both win,” Ray said. “If I take the window view, I won’t know which to look at, the great view, or out the window.”

  She gave him a kiss for that and took the seat with her back to the window. “I like this. I’ve got a view and the weather outside won’t distract me.”

  “You two are very happy to be back together, aren’t you?” Andy noted.

  “Very,” came in two-part harmony.

  “Well, I’ve been looking over our star map. I’d like to order the Northampton out for some more sniffing, likely with a pair of heavies with her.”

  “What did you see that I didn’t?” Rita asked.

  “Likely nothing, but I’ve been gnawing at the problem in my sleep,” Andy said. “Remind me to buy some new pillows.”

  They chuckled at his joke.

  “Anyway, it’s the problem of the two jumps that take you through thick gases. I asked my computer to tell me how often you get two dirty jumps one after another. It’s found thirty-five so far, but this one is the only one in our neighborhood. I know it will take a bitch of a long time, but I think the Northampton needs to sniff around all the jumps out of that nebula.”

  “They thought the sniffer lost its calibration after the nova’s gas got into the intakes,” Rita pointed out.

  “So, we don’t activate the sniffer until we’re out of the gas clouds. Someone has to be able to come up with a cap or seal or something to cover over the intake.”

  “Right,” again came in a duet.

  “I’ll get the Navy yard on the job,” Ray said. “We’ll want to pick a pair of heavies and have them ready when Matt’s boat is out of the body and fender shop.”

  “That should be in a week,” Rita said. Keeping a heavy cruiser shipshape and battle-ready was more of a job than she’d had with her transports, but then, there was a whole lot more that could go wrong and when you’re prowling around looking for wreckage, you’re risking having someone not like what you just nosed into. That is not time for something to go wrong.”

  “I think we can make that happen. A week won’t be that long,” Ray said. “And we’ve got other ships out cruising the spaceways, just begging to be scooped up by some bold pirate man.”

  “I don’t know if we’ll get any bites,” Andy said. “It’s been a while.”

  “I got one,” Rita said.

  “Yeah,” Ray said, “but you are so desirable.”

  “I’ll leave you two love birds to do whatever it is you’re up to,” Andy said, and headed back to his office.

  The morning went fast. They managed to go home for lunch, both so Rita could feed Alex and they could squeeze in a quickie. Still, by one, she was back at the ministry and Ray was over with Admiral Zilko.

  Which put Ray in a very happy mood on the drive home. “Your father, or someone got the government to cut loose more money. We not only have enough to crew another three ships, but a contract has been signed with Savannah to build six heavy cruisers and pay for them to outfit another half-dozen scouts that are being collected from the mothball fleets around our side of the rim.”

  “You think your dangerous civilian had her lovely manicured fingers in this?” Rita asked.

  “What have you got against her?”

  “She’s gorgeous, and flaunts it . . . near my husband.”

  Ray leaned over and kissed her. “But said husband only has eyes for you.”

  “But a girl can worry, can’t she?”

  “She can worry all she wants, so long as she does it right here beside me.”

  “Always,” Rita said.

  Or at least for the next couple of weeks. Or months. Maybe we can both ship out on the Exeter. Alex will be weaned soon. He wouldn’t miss us if we were gone for just the few weeks it would take to clean out a pirate nest.

  We’ll have the time we need to make it all come together.

  8

  Captain Edmon Lehrer, the closest thing to a commander the proud pirate base LeMonte had, was surprised at how quickly the pirates made it all came together. Usually you had to make every decision three or four times because someone didn’t like it or wanted to go over it again.

  Of course, if you even whisper the word “gold” around people like his crew, they were running before you finish the word.

  That they had no idea who or what those big fellows were digging out the gold, much less how much of a fight they might put up seemed to worry very few.

  Ed spent several hours in counsel with that few.

  “They’re trying to have us buy a pig in a poke.” Grace O’Malley of the Happy Highway Wench was one of the doubters. Not that she wasn’t one of the best at taking a colony for every last scrap of bacon and drop of beer when they raided one at the rim of human space.

  “We could look things over before we charge in,” Anne Bonney of the Proper Daughter’s Revenge, said.

  “I agree,” Calico Jack said, nodding. He often agreed with the ladies and rarely left meetings alone. Ed had his doubt about his value in council, but he was a veteran of the Unity War and the best ground fighter they had. Half the guns in the armory had been taken when he chose to face down a bunch of colonists on Cle Elum.

  For a while it had looked like it would come to a bloody fight, but Calico Jack had managed to maneuver his troops between the amateur army the farmers had thrown together and the nearest water supply. Confronted with having to attack entrenched riflemen to fill their canteens, common sense prevailed.

  Jack had agreed to reduce his demands by half, and the Cle Elum’s jumped up colonel had agreed to surrender half his rifles with the other half put well aside. The colonials had promised Jack fervently that they’d have more guns coming on the next ship and then they’d be only too glad to offer him a rematch.

  Jack had managed to make off with not only the half of the armory they’d surrendered, but got his hands on the rest of their guns on the way out. Still, no pirate had been back to Cle Elum since.

  So Calico Jack’s crew was the best armed, right ahead of Grace O’Malley and Anne Bonney’s crew. Exactly what the gals traded for rifles was something Ed was only too happy to speculate on.

  “You aren’t going to put us under that Billy Maynard?” Grace said. “The man’s a fool and a hot head, when he’s not being led around by his gonads.”

  “I do agree that we need to keep our own chain of command,” Calico Jack said. “We’ll do what you and him agree on, but we do it our way.”

  “That is my plan,” Ed said. “I’ll coordinate with Bill, but I won’t have you doing anything I don’t think is good for us.”

  “How’s the loot goin
g to be shared?” Calico Jack asked.

  “That’s a sticking point, but not one that should delay us. Of what we get for actually laying our crews on the line, twenty-five percent of what we capture in the first week will be split evenly between the captains. Thirty percent goes to the sailors that stay in orbit. The rest, forty-five percent goes to those that land with a gunner getting double what a non-gunner gets.”

  “Non-gunner?” Calico Jack asked.

  “Some of the farm hands at Port Elgin want in on the landing action. They’ll have knives, spears, whatever is steel and has a sharp edge.”

  “They’re gonna get clobbered if there’s any serious fighting,” Grace said.

  Ed shrugged. “Their report says that these jokers are mostly miners what don’t have any weapons. And there are a lot of them. We’ll likely need more people covering the prisoners than we got rifles so it’s not such a bad idea. Still, as they said, gunners get double the pay of knife men.”

  “Or women,” Anne said.

  “Yeah,” Ed agreed. “Anyway, we’ll know more when we got everyone out there and are looking the place over from orbit. That’s when we’ll decide how it comes down.”

  “What if they got ships in orbit?” Grace O’Malley asked.

  “Then we either cut and run or we stand and fight. I’m taking the Queen Anne’s Revenge. Black Bart will have the Your Bad Day. We’ve got twelve working 6-inchers between us. My crew’s working hard on getting that last 6-incher back on line. Your ships between them add in another half dozen 6-inchers and an equal number of 4-inchers.”

  Ed eyed the captains. They nodded agreement. Hopefully no more lasers would get sick, lame or lazy before they could carry off this raid. If they really did get gold out of this, they might be able to bribe some more salvage yards to give them parts, or even a cruiser or two.

  Everything depended on getting the gold.

  “What’s Billy boy got at, what’s that place, Port Elgin?” Grace asked.

  “Yeah, Port Elgin. When he left here, he took half of what we had,” Ed said. “Depending on what of his has come down with the dropsy, he could double our force, or maybe not.”

  “This Captain Huzi tell you anything about what they got?”

  “Nothing I believe,” Ed said. His old granny had told him not to ask a question he didn’t want the answer to or trust the answer he got. Huzi was all grand talk. Ed was still trying to figure out how much of it to believe.

  Ed trusted him for the sack of gold nuggets he’d dropped on the table . . . and not a farthing more.

  “Well, we’re wasting time,” O’Malley said, coming to her feet. “I figure I can get the Wench away from the pier by this time tomorrow.”

  “The Revenge will be right behind you,” Anne said.

  “And the Queen Anne’s Revenge will be at the head of your line,” Ed said.

  “Does that mean my You Didn’t See This Coming and Your Worst Nightmare have to come up the rear?” Calico Jack said with a laughing whine.

  “You never minded coming up my rear,” O’Malley said.

  “But your front was the goal. Now your rear will be between me and the gold.”

  “Doesn’t he say the nicest things?” Anne said.

  “That’s the only reason we keep him around,” O’Malley said.

  “And I thought it was because I shoot so nice and straight.”

  “Get over yourself, boy.”

  “Or over you?”

  “Not tonight. If I’m getting this show on the road, I got some lasers to babysit, parts to scavenge, and heads to knock,” Grace said.

  “Business before pleasure, boy. Business before pleasure. Remember that,” Annie said.

  “I think they got that right,” Ed said.

  “Yeah. This time tomorrow,” Calico Jack said.

  Captain Edmon Lehrer didn’t know whether to be surprised or shocked, but by that time the next day, he was indeed leading ten ships away from the pier right behind his Revenge as they all headed for the furthest jump point.

  They weren’t all just eager pirates. Some of his farmers had produced some wicked looking blades, tightly wound to long stout wooden poles, and demanded to be taken along.

  The two usual hanger queens were still tied up alongside. The Sengo and the Yaka had been in pretty poor shape when they were taken, and had been more a source of parts than real ships since arriving at LeMonte. They’d managed to struggle away from the yard at High Savannah loaded with machinery of questionable worth and men, former soldiers, and cops of even more questionable value.

  Except for them, and the worse drunks and dregs as well as the more docile farmers, everyone was headed out for gold and glory.

  Assuming they could trust any word they got from Port Elgin.

  9

  Major General Ray Longknife didn’t know whether to be glad or mad. He had a lot to be glad for, but he had a damn itch he could not scratch and that was driving him up the walls.

  He tried to focus on what he had to be grateful for.

  Rita was home. She was in his bed every night and he woke up beside her every morning. He understood that many men found that to be a most fulfilling existence.

  No question, it was nice.

  He had a growing boy. He had the cutest little grin with the cutest tiny teeth, and he was taking his first steps, usually from his mommy’s loving arms to his daddy’s outstretched hands.

  Oh, and his first words were “da da.”

  Ray kept trying to tell himself this was a wonderful life.

  And Ray was training a division of troops. The proud 2nd brigade was now just one of three brigades under his command. And Earth had made it official. They were the 1st Wardhaven Division, Society of Humanity Army, under the command of a Society of Humanity major general.

  There had even been a big ceremony where Rita had pinned on his second star.

  “But don’t forget,” she’d whispered in his ear. “You’re still retired.”

  Well, for someone retired, he was spending a lot of time at the cantonment outside Wardhaven seeing that the troops were properly trained. The politicians that dropped by to watch them parade or maneuver too often mumbled, “It’s only pirates you’ll be going up against, Right?’”

  Ray had gotten a hold of some video taken on a planet named Cle Elum where there had damn near been a major force engagement with regimental size battle groups on both sides. The colonials had not even had mortars in support. The pirates had managed to knock together a couple of them, and that, along with the savvy way the pirate commander outfoxed the locals on their own ground and got between them and water, had settled the matter.

  The locals were drilling a lot more now and had bought mortars, support rockets, and artillery. Ray made a point of talking up the quality of the Cle Elum militia when he talked to his junior officer’s mess.

  “If you can’t get your shit together, I’ll damn well hire up some of the Cle Elum militia.”

  His troops trained hard.

  So, three days a week, maybe four, he was out at the cantonment. Two days a week, sometimes one, he was back at the ministry.

  Still, every night, he was home with Rita, and the compromise seemed to satisfy her.

  However, if Ray was reading the smoke signals right, his woman was itching in places neither she nor he could scratch.

  “Damn,” was the first word out of her mouth when he picked her up one afternoon on his way home.

  “Bad day at the office?”

  “We’ve got a message back from the Northampton. She’s checked out the jumps from that nebula that she didn’t go over because of her messed-up sniffer last time.”

  “And she found . . .” Ray said, knowing that both of them wanted her to say Matt had found the trail of the pirates, but he suspected the initial “Damn” meant he hadn’t.

  “Nothing. Oh, they got some jumps that had more residual reaction mass in the vacuum of space than other jumps, but there wasn’t enough to make a
definite trail. They’d have to chase down one after another of the jumps, check them all out, and they could be doing that from now until doomsday.”

  “Does Matt have any suggestion as to why the trail’s gone cold?”

  “Either they’ve got several paths in and out of human space,” Rita said, “or the trail is cold because they haven’t used it for a while.”

  “Maybe I’ve had my head in too much mean green,” Ray said, “but have the raiding depredations slowed down?”

  “They most certainly have, my general. We’ve got more buoys out now. We’re having them jump through at least once a day. That makes for more communication out on the rim and lets us know if we’ve lost a buoy sometime during the day. Anyway, it’s been a couple of weeks since any colony got hit with independent tax collectors, as they have taken to calling themselves.”

  “We ought to wipe them out if for no other reason than their lousy sense of humor,” Ray said.

  “Well, I’m wondering if they’re going into a second phase. No, third phase. Chasing ships. Raiding colonies. Now, what?”

  “Could their crops be coming in? Maybe they have enough to eat and don’t need to raid planets for food.”

  “Yes, but what are they doing? Sitting on their asses, twiddling their thumbs?”

  Ray made a face at that thought. “Pirates don’t usually choose a line of work that lets them live long and retire comfortably. They want all that glitters. Where are they getting it? Whitebred? We burned out Milassi’s drug farm, but he said he saved some seeds. Could they be going into the drug business?”

  “I wondered about that, but there are no reports of a sudden influx of new drugs. The usual stuff, but nothing special. I even chased down some of the scientists that worked on the drug farm that Ruth and your Mary burned out on Savannah. It didn’t take much to get them talking about what they were trying to grow. I ran that through channels and nobody has seen anything like it coming to market.”

  Ray made a sour face. “All we’re getting is negatives. They haven’t done this. They aren’t doing that. What are they doing?”