"You've got all that pretty straight actually," Gordon admitted. "Go ahead and have them install this thing in the Sharp Claws."
* * *
The number of agents involved in rescuing Lee and her friends had expanded until Richard Dixon was sucked back in. He was reporting to his boss:
"The Williamsons had no desire to leave Earth. When I asked him where he wanted to go he just said, "Somewhere warm."
"Well yeah. Living in Northern Michigan could do that."
"We bought them a house on Grand Cayman and resident rights. He indicated an interest in acquiring a sailboat. I think it will work out."
"Huh, I've read the folder on this guy. If he has a boat he'll be smuggling in a month."
"He doesn't need the money…but no, you're probably right," Dixon agreed.
* * *
The local militia commander was angry, the intersection behind the three intertwined smashed vehicles was riddled with holes. They were six levels down and nowhere near vacuum, but the scale of lawbreaking on prohibited weapons was staggering. The fact all the responsible parties were dead, left him with nowhere to vent his wrath. Jesus and the guard captain stood together, trying to placate him. Militia with armbands filled the street.
"Nobody can find any holes the direction your guys were shooting," he admitted reluctantly. "What are those weapons," the fellow asked, nodding at the guards who were back on duty at the front door.
"Masers," The Hinth captain assured him. "They heat water very effectively but absolutely will not damage a pressure holding structure."
"OK, and the sonic weapon is legal," the Loonie allowed, "even if it did bust the street lighting for three blocks and every piece of china in the Polish Embassy's kitchen."
"We deeply regret that and will be happy to compensate the city and any private parties."
"Somebody said you used a grenade though," the militia man accused.
"Indeed we did, but it is an Israeli model that blows a metallic grit, rather than large pieces of shrapnel. It will not breach pressure and beyond three meters it will do little but sting on bare skin," he told him. Inside three meters what it did was too ugly to discuss.
"Anything else I should know about?" he asked fishing, but he was wearing down and somewhat mollified.
"The only other weapon we used was this," the alien told him. He reached back and drew from behind his head. The sword was like a katana, but proportioned for the lanky aliens, it was almost about a third longer than one made for a human. It also was almost straight, but the steel was patterned in complex layers and the edge case hardened in a wavy silver line like traditional human weapons. The handle was obviously a double handed affair. It was beautiful.
The militiaman took a deep breath and let it out. "I will report your defense was entirely legal and necessary," he conceded. "If I seemed rude or distrusting please forgive me. This breach and the scale of it are very disturbing. I have no idea what the repercussions are going to be, but the general population is going to want somebody to learn to whistle without air. I'm going to recommend at the end of my report they toss the Norte Americanos out on their ear and close their embassy."
"I applaud that," the alien told him. "The Hinth have been awaiting an appropriate reason to end their relationship with the USNA also and the onerous conditions of our treaty with Man," he confided. "I believe sending their soldiers to assault our embassy and wound both Hinth and the arms men of one name bound to us, is more than sufficient reason to separate ourselves. I am heartened your volunteers flooded to our door, even though it was over so quickly. I do understand the brassards they wear correctly?" he asked.
"Yes, they are all citizens by choice and come out of their own free will."
"There is a vast difference between these," he waved at the dead bodies, "and you. I think we know enough now to stop being so stand-offish. There are less than a double dozen of humans whose name we have acknowledged and list in our clan books. I am trained to bear it, yet it is most distressing to speak bare faced to you. I would call you comrade and offer my name if you dare bind yourself to one so different in body, but with common cause against such as these," he said waved again at the ruined corpses.
"I am John Lott," the man replied. He seemed bright and aware what he was doing was not casual. "I am not the head of either the militia or Armstrong, but speaking for myself, I welcome your friendship and will try to honor it. We are far from perfect. We may disappoint you, if you expect us to be everything you want," he cautioned.
"I am Tri-til-tit-talo," the Hinth offered, "and I see your face brother. I have not found perfection in my own life mate. The Hinth in all our glory, have not quite attained perfection either. We'll muddle through somehow though," he predicted.
* * *
"Are you familiar with how early rockets were built in stages?" Gordon asked his Astrogator McKenzie.
"Yes, I did a report on historic human vehicles in school. I even built a model of a Saturn rocket for class. It stood near as tall as me and the teacher gave me a lousy assessment on it, because I didn't include figures to give scale to it and it did not function at all. Some butt kisser built a working steam locomotive, that made everybody else look bad," he remembered. This amused Thor enough to get a good snicker.
"I'm thinking we could do the same thing with the Retribution carrying the Sharp Claws. We need to grapple like we did going into Fargone, release the Sharp Claws and pull back so she can proceed to jump and back into the system. She can make jump with very little expenditure of fuel and have a full fuel load to accelerate into the next system."
"Accelerate into the system?"
"Yeah, I was thinking a very fast transit would allow you to pass through a system and release weapons faster than their defense is designed to react or intercept."
"You would be very low on fuel, after an aborted run with such a heavy grappled object. Indeed you might not have enough for a another run and deceleration into another system. So you'd be trapped in system until you could refuel. That might be embarrassing if they send a response back through after the Sharp Claws' emergence. You'd be trapped."
"What if I have a freighter with a load of fuel waiting out-system? We drop the Sharp Claws, decelerate as she pulls ahead to jump, to get out of her jump disturbance and then continue decelerating to meet a prepositioned tanker far out on the fringes of the system? We fuel up there and are in a good position tactically if a force does jump in."
"Nobody builds a tanker. The few times a ship has gotten stuck in a system with no fuel facilities, they've always jumped a ship with good capacity in, to share fuel to extricate them."
"So the transfer equipment already exists," Gordon pointed out. "We have two freighters. How hard can it be to convert one to a tanker of sorts? It doesn't have to be economically viable for moving bulk fuel to sell. This is military logistics, not market driven."
McKenzie considered it for a bit. "If that's all you want to do, we can buy some cryogenic tanks for external grappling. They do ship other volatiles besides fuel. We can buy a standard design. We should buy a number and a freighter can use them to meet us in unpopulated systems for refueling, or we can straight out mount them to our fighting vessels to extend their range. If we drain them, we can always leave them somewhere one of the freighters can go pick them up. We can leave caches of full tanks for that matter."
"The ship will handle like a pig with full tanks strapped on," Thor reminded them.
"I like it," Gordon said, "It leaves the holds open to carry other supplies if they don't mass too much. We can send consumables and even personnel."
"Do you have a particular target in mind? Maybe one of their naval depots? Tau Ceti has a naval yard but I'd hate to make a fast transit of the system, unless it was at right angles to the plane of the system. It's too full of crap to blast through the debris disk," McKenzie warned.
"I was thinking Sol," Gordon revealed.
"You're nuts."
"You're
nuts, sir." Gordon corrected him.
"Have you had these suicidal thoughts long?" McKenzie asked him. "Have you been skipping your meds, or changed them recently? Your friends really do care," he assured him.
"No, really, think about it."
"I am. Not only is the strength of the USNA in the system, every nation that has even one armed space vessel, has it in the Sol system most of the time. You are going to have USNA, Alliance of South American States, Indian, British, European Union, Chinese, Japanese, Australian Confederation, Russian, Swiss, South East Asian Economic Union and Persian Empire ships all around Earth. They all tend to run exercises in system, as it is cheaper, so you always have ships here and there out to Jupiter and occasionally beyond."
"Bah," Gordon waved it away. "With all those factions elbow to elbow, they are going to be very reluctant to fire on anything until they are sure it is hostile to them. They live there and the last thing they want is to do is an 'oops' that will provoke hostilities right where they live. It is way too easy to start a war by mistake and much harder to stop them. Besides, how many of those ships are manned and provisioned and on alert? Most are owned just to get their country in the Claims Commission Defense Fleet so they get a little bigger chunk of the action. They only spend the money to use them when they are called up. I'm more concerned about some orbital defenses, that are operational constantly, but few ships."
"All right, assuming you can make a very fast pass and not get your butt shot off, what sort of target do you have in mind? Myself, I'd resign before I will target civilians. I think most of the human crew would resign before they'd drop a rock on Vancouver. If you could lay a small one right on the Congress in session maybe, but we have not yet seen sufficient jackassery to warrant a strategic response. Not until they bombard Red Tree, or seize Derf of other clans."
"Most of the Derf would walk for that too," Gordon assured him. "I had in mind targeting one of the orbital forts and the USNA naval ship yards at L4. They have a DSBP that has been building three years, that's almost complete in a surround dock and are assembling two destroyers floating free."
"Do a three stage," Thor suggested. "Strap external tanks on the destroyer. Toss her at the jump point. Use the external tanks to accelerate into the system. Do your attack and jump out the other side with almost full internal tanks to decelerate, or jump again and evade. Because sure as hell somebody is going to be following pissed off."
"We need to read the almanacs. If you time the entry we can approach from behind the moon, so the fort can't read us directly. Skim the moon close and aim to skim the Earth as close as possible to the atmosphere. Fire on the fort from underneath them. I bet they don't even have that written into their automated responses. Drop the empty tanks on a collision course for the shipyard and fire on it with conventional nukes," McKenzie counseled
"If you are crossing the fort's orbit, shoot at it as soon as you clear the Lunar horizon with this new peashooter of yours. Then drop your tanks on a collision course with the shipyard, to give them something to shoot at. At the velocity they will be going they aren't really decoys, they are significant kinetic weapons. If they don't blow them to plasma just busting them up will be self defeating. It just means they will almost ensure some debris will hit them," Thor said.
"In that case put some charges on them and make sure they break up," McKenzie advised. "I'm not even sure we need to waste any missiles. Damn things are expensive."
"You're right," Gordon agreed. "But we have two launch tubes on the Sharp Claws, so I very much want to waste two conventional nukes to make sure that DSBP is dead and maybe the fort if the pellet doesn't do it. We'll save the X-heads."
"Launch them behind the blown tanks in coast and sprint mode," Thor advised. "That shooting through a screening action really worked before. Set them not to maneuver until they are just far enough out they will catch up with the tank debris, not pass and present a target out front of it."
"Oh, add a few kilo of chaff to the charges blowing the tanks," McKenzie added.
"We'll read the orbital almanac and see when everything will line up with an entry point and an exit to a safe system on the far side. It's going to be hard to find two systems close enough to Sol, that have no USNA presence to prevent us carrying this out."
"I'd like to sit the arms board on this raid," Thor requested. He was still bothered he hadn't had a shot at the cruiser.
"Well we'll be going like bat out of hell leaving Sol, so that allows us to do jump to systems that might be a low probability jump at normal velocities," McKenzie said.
"Good point. Look in the catalog and see what systems are too marginal for normal jump and see what the math looks like at higher velocity. If we can pick one that we can't be followed, without the pursuit running their tanks dry, that would be sweet," Gordon agreed.
"You know if we can do this it is going to make Happenstance very happy. A new weapon system used and ships attacking at velocities way above normal transit speeds. The navies will have to spend a lot of new money to upgrade and invent new systems to deal with it. My bet is he'll be in hog heaven and grab a big chunk of the loot. See what you can buy us for tanks and what can be fabricated on short notice."
"Gordon, I think you should do some psych ops before you do an Earth raid," McKenzie urged him. "You should formally give them a chance to surrender. There's not a chance in hell they will accept, but beside the joy of irritating them makes you look better and if the raid succeeds it makes them look even more foolish and less able to complain."
* * *
"Come, let us tell your Mistress what we have been able to arrange and see if it pleases her," Tri-til-tit-talo invited Jesus. Jesus nodded a yes and waved Diana to come along. They followed the Hinth back into the street from their meeting at the Swiss embassy. "You can call on Diana here Tri, anytime you can't get my attention. She has the same ranking and authority as I do in Blackwater, even if I am technical lead on this assignment. Next job she may be leading me."
"Tri?" Tri-til-tit-talo asked. "Are you abbreviating my name?" he inquired.
"Uh, yeah, it was just automatic, unthinking really, if it doesn't offend. We usually use nicknames when we work closely. I even abbreviate Diana down to Di sometimes, even if it isn't a mouthful. Some of the crew call me Chewy and I'm not even sure where they got that. It doesn't really save time. If it seems too familiar tell us."
Tri looked at them with that half-open beak look he was pretty sure was laughter, or at least a smile. "With the Hinth familiarity is pretty much binary. You are either tribe and clan, or 'other'. Perhaps with a dozen generations and long association, we will start to have shades of grey between the two. For now I will take this nickname for a strange new sort of affectionate familiarity. How we express it may shock you however. If my life mate reckons you are clan, she would feel free to send her sister to stay at your house. We have a guest like that right now, what you would call a cousin."
"In town playing the tourist or something?" Diana asked.
"In town from a far rural area, to finish her secondary education and likely work an internship. We expect her to be with us eight of our years. Maybe more if she gets work close and we continue to get along. Some might urge her to move on after her need is past if she were disagreeable, but she has grown to be like a daughter to us."
"Not so strange," Diana allowed. "I know some African cultures that would do exactly the same."
"That is nice to know we are not too different then."
They entered the front door of the Hinth embassy now, with just a slight bow from the guards. There was no human nonsense with presenting paperwork.
Tri rapped lightly on the door and there was no response. He tried the handle and it was locked. Finally he took some kind of electronic key and crossed the handset in an X pattern. When he pushed the door in, there was a clatter of falling cans. Lee had stacked the soda from the fridge against the door so they would act as an alarm. She and Clare were sleeping on the cou
ch in a puppy pile, but by the time the door was full open she was looking over the sights of the nine millimeter with bleary eyes even before the cans stopped rolling. As half awake as she was, Jesus noted she had the hammer back and the weapon pointed rock steady center of mass at the only male human target. He'd have rathered it wasn't him. At least her finger was not in the trigger guard yet. Jesus showed her his palms and waited for her to wake up fully before he took another step closer.
"Ah, you survived," she said and seemed pleased. She pointed the pistol at the ceiling and dropped the hammer safe. "What," she asked, "was that horrible noise a while ago?"
Tri gestured at the cans scattered on the floor. "This little one is wise beyond her years," he told them. "She makes her own security, instead of depending on others. No wonder our explorer gave her his name."
"We have a free ride to Fargone for the four of us, on a Fargone fast courier if you like," Jesus told her. "We will go directly to it from here. It leaves in about two hours and we and the ambassador fill it one short of max life support capacity, so it will be crowded," he warned. "We will have to share rooms and bunk together, or in shifts. Want to accept his hospitality?"
"And we are free to go on to Derfhome?" Lee asked.
"Certainly."
"You aim to come along, or you turning back from Fargone?"
"We can discuss that. Neither of us intend to return to the Earth system to live or work, ever," he emphasized. "If we don't continue you can hire all sorts of security on Fargone."
"Sounds good. What does the Fargoer get out of it?"
"At this point he may well do it just to irritate the North Americans," Jesus allowed. "They are sort of miffed the USNA decided to have a space battle in their system, uninvited."
"OK, I can understand that." Lee looked at Tri-til-tit-talo and lifted her spread fingers for a veil to look at him. He waved them away. "You are known little human. No need for you and yours to ever veil the face with our race."
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