Once I'd learned the basics of protecting myself, mainly from Amanda, who as sexy as she looked, was downright scary when in professional Mercenary mode, I'd fought with the team, generating a feeling of family with them.
Brigadier General Annabelle Smith was the grey haired older officer you could look up to, a quietly decisive and effective leader. As she now worked for me, and I carried higher rank now, I was finally able to call her by her first name. I wasn’t sure why it was now so much easier, but it was.
George Murdock was the sole other man on the team, now a combat pilot, who'd once been something of a do-a-bit-of-everything sort of warrior. He'd had to step up without warning, and had proved himself over the last few days. He was the one who introduced me to suit programming. His fighter call sign was 'Gorilla', as he'd been seen wearing a Gorilla outfit while in the midst of a furious combat melee.
Command Sergeant Major Anne (BA) Baracas, was the combat leader, tough as nails, but surprisingly, loving little kittens as much as I do. She'd surprised me several times now with some very insightful comments. She might act like a tough grunt, but she'd a brain, and used it.
Abigail was the tech, computers and coms being her stated specialty. But I'd always had the notion she was a hacker of exceptional ability. I intended to put that to the test sometime soon.
Aline and Agatha were dropship gunners. Combat Mercenaries used special ships designed for rapid entry into the atmosphere of planets, so they could deploy as fast as possible. Alas, we didn't have one at the moment, as theirs had been destroyed during the Pompeii civil war. Another thing I was planning to address. They'd proved themselves just as adept with Corvette turrets against missiles.
Alana was the demolitions expert. I hadn't seen her practice her trade as yet. I'm not sure I wanted to. She was also a competent gunner.
I'd not had much chance to talk to Aline, Agatha and Alana so far. Of the team, they seemed the most aloof. Although it was Aline who'd pushed the most, to include me in the team.
All the girls were somewhere between twenty and thirty, and had gorgeously fit bodies. I knew, having seen them all naked. We'd shared a spa after I'd pulled the team out of Pompeii. They were all very casual about nudity.
I'd hardly finished looking around at them, when more people entered the CCC.
General Vonda Wellington was my current boss. She had three stars to my two, except that Admirals wore stripes and not stars. Behind her came Commander Alsop, her aide. Vonda looked the room over in a cursory glance.
"We need to talk," she said in a serious tone, looking at me. "Everyone out please."
They all left, looking somewhat more cheery now.
Acting like a hero didn’t mean you didn’t get your butt kicked. And apparently they still thought I needed it.
After they'd gone, Vonda stood there, looking up at me. She chuckled.
"Like it up there, do you?" she asked.
"As it happens, yes." I grinned at her. "But don’t blame me, the AI designed it. I'm just sitting here because this is where the pilot controls are."
"I'll take your word for it. Millions won't."
I climbed down, and we settled into adjoining console chairs. I wondered why Janet hadn't added the obligatory conference room to the design. She and Jane kept downloading my entertainment library, and throwing things at me from what I viewed. So they should know every Bridge has a conference room attached. Come to think of it, there was no Captain's ready room either. Mystifying.
Vonda looked at me really hard. The last time she'd done this, she'd been trying to work out if I was a homicidal maniac. I waited.
"If you're insane, I guess I'm not competent to spot it."
I gave her the Maniac grin.
"On the other hand," she began.
"Let's not go there?" I suggested.
"I could just get you psych evaluated I suppose." I shuddered. "But I guess it would take too long, and we need you here for now." I smiled. "Exactly why did you evacuate the station?"
"Seemed like a good idea at the time." She didn’t look impressed. "Okay, put it this way. I took a gamble that one pilot and two AI's, could outfight six Missile Cruisers, and one hundred and eighty Talons, using the unique design of this station. If I was wrong, the only person who got hurt was me."
"And me," interjected Janet.
"All of our ships were damaged. And we'd less than half what we started with. Trying to repeat what we did earlier was just going to be suicide. I figured if it was going to be a one way trip to hell, there was no point in taking anyone else with me."
"And how long did it take you to work all that out?"
"About thirty seconds."
"I'm glad you took proper time to think it through."
"There was no time."
"I know. I'm just finding out how you tick."
"I'm ticking?" I deliberately tried to deflect things with what was a bad joke.
"Ha-ha. Well, you managed to scare the shit out of everyone, but it worked. I wish you'd called me to discuss it first, but that’s what a combat commander is there for. To make the hard calls, and get the job done." She paused. "You've a reputation for being a hero. What you just did, would make or break anyone. Most, I suspect, would have broken. If anything, it looks like it made you. You came out of it stronger than before."
George and I had discussed the whole 'hero' thing. Neither of us understood it. I let it go.
"With, not to mention, a sore foot."
"I gather your team aren't impressed you left them behind?"
"You noticed?"
"A bit obvious. I'll have a word with General Smith for you."
"Thanks." I sighed. "Lunch?"
"I've eaten, but you go ahead."
"By my reckoning we've about two and a half hours before the next attack arrives. Which reminds me. Janet?"
"Yes my Lord?"
"Move us back to the edge of scanner range of the jump point. I want to be able to see when they down jump as soon as they do, but I don’t want us anywhere near them. Have Repulse follow us. Leave the salvage droids to continue building a debris field in front of the jump point, but recall them in two hours."
"Yes my Lord."
"Janet, do you have to call me that?"
"Yes my Lord."
Vonda laughed while I sighed. Or laughed at me sighing, I wasn’t quite sure.
I headed for Gunbus. The way was no longer littered with bodies and debris. For the first time I wondered where all the bodies went. I asked Jane.
"They go into the station's waste management system. Eventually their remains fertilize the parks and gardens. Except for our dead soldiers, who are in the morgue awaiting transport back to Avon."
"Is that being organized?"
"Yes. But the freighter isn't being sent until it's known to be safe to do so."
Made sense to me.
I didn't linger on the Barracks Deck of Gunbus, going straight up the stairwell to my suite. The damage on Deck Two looked a lot tidier than it had when I'd last seen it. During the battle this morning, Gunbus had been solidly hit. Vonda's office was completely wrecked, as was Alsop's.
I kept going up, and climbed over the cat wall. A small white Furball ambushed me, and climbed up my left side onto my shoulder.
Meow mrow mow meow.
"I take it you missed me Angel?" I said to my ten week old Lilac point Siamese kitten.
She bit my ear.
"Ouch. What was that for?"
MEOW.
"Ok, I'm sorry. I didn’t have a choice. Jane and Jeeves took care of you, didn't they?"
Mew.
"Well what are you complaining about? It hasn’t been that long."
I got 'the look'.
"Ok, it's been all morning. I'm sorry. I'm here for a bit, let's make the most of it."
I hurried into my living room, and dropped her on the top of her kitty castle. I set her cat ball rolling for her. She shot down the castle, and pounced on it.
I sat at the dining table, and Jeeves, Deck One's butler droid, had food in front of me before I could ask.
Before I knew it, I had kitten nosing at my plate. I sniffed the food. Tuna casserole. Guess who only eats tuna? I dug a bit out, and dropped it on the floor. She crawled her way down my leg. Fortunately, my suit didn’t let her claws penetrate my skin. I’d adjusted it so she could climb, but still keep me scratch free.
Angel sniffed at the morsel on the floor. She looked at me as if to say 'Is that it?'
"That’s it sweetie pie. It's cooked, not raw."
She waggled her back paw for a moment, and shot off to dive bomb the cat ball. Jeeves came quietly in, and remove the mess.
I ate, while Angel performed.
Five
After eating, I obliged the puss with my presence around the kitty castle, but my mind was only half with her.
I needed to catch up with emails. These never ended. I was getting junk mail advertising everything from porn, to luxury islands for sale on Gold Coast. The downside of being thought rich, everyone wanted to sell you something.
Actually I was rich, at least for now. I'd sold captured ships to the American and Australian sectors, and received a huge payment for license fees to build Gunbus and Excalibur class ships. I'd been instrumental in creating the designs, so received half the license fees. Excalibur was a Heavy Privateer, a long range heavy fighter. No other heavy fighter could beat it, one-on-one.
Midgard used the Talon medium short range fighter in large numbers, so most fighters were vulnerable to missile spamming. Spamming was when one hundred and eighty fighters all lit off missiles at you at the same time. Or a Missile Cruiser sent two hundred missiles at you. Unless you had excellent Point Defense, you were toast. The Americans had found this out the hard way not long ago, and had bought the licenses to both my designs, to compensate for theirs being very out of date.
So while I was currently rolling in credits, so to speak, it was only going to be a short term thing.
On my way through Midgard, I'd been able to capture myself a fleet. The Midgard Missile Cruisers were formidable offensively, but had no defenses. Hence the large numbers of fighters escorting them. I'd left Midgard with six largely intact Cruisers, and a seventh in two halves. I'd also, thanks to a renegade American sector Captain, claimed an Actor class Cruiser. And last but not least, I'd saved the remaining crew on board a badly damaged Dallas class Frigate. Her captain, now Commodore O'Neil and working for me, had given me the hull in lieu of a salvage fee.
All of these ships had been in Avon Shipyards for the last four days, being refitted. The Missile Cruisers were being converted into Drone Pocket Battleships. They would mount a single Battleship turret, Cruiser guns, a significant amount of Point Defense turrets and anti-fighter missile launchers, and updated capital ship missile launchers. But they would have no crew, being run by my AI. The original Tyr class design, mounted two hundred capital ship missile launchers on each side. I wasn’t sure yet how many missile launchers would be retained. I'd seen the early specs, but left the engineers at the shipyard to do what worked. John Wayne, the Actor class Cruiser, was having a complete refit as a standard gun Cruiser, but with enough Point Defense added to ensure she wasn’t vulnerable to a two hundred missile barrage. The Actor class, a mainstay in the American fleet, had already proved to be useless fighting against Midgard's Missile Cruisers.
All this was going to cost me a pretty credit. I didn’t know yet, how many.
The new ships were due any time now. O'Neil had left in a shuttle earlier, to take command of the fleet as soon as it was out of the repair bays.
I'd sent the shipyard a hurry up ping, as it was going to be close as to who arrived first. My fleet, or Midgard's.
Midgard itself seemed to have gone Retro. While always having a low-tech approach to things, they now believed that technology users in general, and space travel in particular, would bring on Ragnarok, the end of the world. Oddly, this paralleled prophesy from home, which was called the 'Coming of Darkness'. As it was ten months before I could get home to ask more about it, we didn’t know enough to say if these two forecasts of doom were the same thing or not. In any case, the answer wasn’t to declare war on the rest of humanity, as Midgard had done, minus the declaration. No-one could communicate with Midgard, as the planet had adopted some form of ancient Norse as their language.
I'd dropped into the middle of a civil war when I'd pulled my friends out of Pompeii. I hadn't banked on falling head first into a major war immediately after, trying to get home. Nor had I expected to be the Admiral of my own fleet. I'd just wanted to stay alive, when people kept shooting at me.
Meow.
I stopped musing, and started patting.
When her attention wandered, I went back to emails.
Admiral Jedburgh had sent word of another attack on Miami. Once again, the entire Midgard fleet had destroyed itself on the debris mine field which was blocking the down jump area, from the Midgard system. Each time they did, the obstacle grew in size, and became more lethal. It was giving the American's time to build new ships to counter the threat. As long as we didn’t fail here in Avon, they would come out of it fine. Failing here wasn’t an option, but it'd been very close so far.
A follow up email had expressed his amazement at what I'd done with the station on my own. Apparently, in addition to the station feed I'd sent, Repulse had sent a vid of the whole thing to the British Fleet Command, and they'd forwarded it to the Americans. He'd included it for me. I watched it, seeing the station fight from the perspective of being behind it, and slightly off to one side. Awesome combined with scary.
Miriam had sent me a vid. It was encrypted again, but Jane had given my pad the decryption algorithm. There seemed to be something wrong with her uniform. A lot of cleavage was showing. Nice and distracting, but not normal.
"Hi Jon. I'm glad to hear you made it this morning. How did Angel cope with being in a spacesuit? I wish I was there to hug you, and more."
Her arms moved wide as she mimed a hug, and more of her breasts became visible. As she was in the cockpit of her Excalibur, I hoped she wasn't visible to the rest of her squadron. The Squadron Leader needed to maintain discipline after all, and having the pilots slobbering over her semi-naked form wasn’t a good idea.
I made an effort to stop slobbering myself.
"Greer and I were called in to see Admiral Hallington. He showed us a vid of you and your station fighting a whole fleet alone. He asked us if you were insane. I told him all good heroes were."
She grinned widely, shifted her position, and one of her breasts poked out of her blouse completely.
Greer, was Lieutenant Commander Greer, now Squadron Leader of the new Gunbus squadron, currently being built.
"I don’t know how you did what you did. No-one has ever seen anything like it before. Probably never will again, I hope. Take care Jon. I want to see you back this way as soon as Midgard is brought to their knees. Don’t get killed doing something stupid. Let me rephrase that. Don’t get killed. Period."
She saluted me, resulting in her other breast poking out. She looked down as if to wonder what had happened, gave me a sly minx look, and waved. The vid ended.
I sent her back the noise of a stadium begging an entertainer for an encore.
Six
By half past two, I was back in the pilot's chair in the CCC. There was no sign of the next enemy fleet yet, but I wasn’t taking the chance.
I opened a channel to O'Neil. This was possible because we'd laid a series of comsats all the way to the jump point from the planet. This wasn’t normal, but then, the whole situation wasn’t normal.
"Commodore, what's your ETA?"
"An hour, Admiral."
"That’s going to be cutting it fine. The next Midgard fleet is expected at the same time."
"Understood. All ships are ready Admiral. They won't know what hit them this time."
"Were all the ships completed to spec?"
<
br /> "Yes sir. And I've brought them all with me. I wouldn't have believed the difference in the John Wayne, if I hadn't lived on her before."
"Does Custer have an external docking port that Gunbus could dock with?"
"Yes sir. Custer now has a very similar layout to Gunbus internally, so both droid airlocks will mate, creating a solid seal. I'm amazed what they did with the old girl. She has a new lease on life now."
"Great. I'll take command of Custer then, but we won't be engaging unless there's no alternative."
"Sir. You've done your bit for today. Sit this one out, and watch the show." He chuckled. I joined in.
"I will, thank you. Hunter out."
I opened up team coms.
"I'll be going to the General Custer shortly, which is approaching with the new fleet. Anyone who wishes to come along is welcome. We'll not be participating in the coming battle, but will closely observe it. It's more than likely we'll be on her for several days, so bring anything you have on the station that you'll need. That includes your combat suits. Please be on board in about ten minutes. For those needing a reason, I promise not to disappoint."
I closed the coms, and opened a channel to Repulse.
"Hunter for Bentley."
"Stand by Admiral."
I waited a few moments.
"Yes Admiral?"
"Turn Repulse around please. The new fleet is an hour away, as is I suspect, the Midgard fleet. Assume they meet about half way to the jump point from here, and move to a position where you can monitor the fight at the edge of sensor range. Once the Midgard fleet jumps in, the station will be joining you. It's time to turn my new toys loose, and see what they can do. We'll all be observers for this battle."
"Understood Admiral. On our way."
The channel closed.
I pinged George to launch Excalibur just before Gunbus undocked. The Privateer was usually docked in Gunbus' hanger, being my private fighter. George had been flying her for the battle this morning. She'd needed repairs, but was back where she lived now.
Make or Break the Hero (The Hunter Legacy Book 4) Page 3
