“How did you come up with this? I’m sure that the Imperial Science Division has been trying to create something to combat them ever since the war started,” he said thinking of his mother who was a research scientist on Earth.
“I’m sure you’re right but we had something they did not,” Angelique remarked.
“What would that be?” he asked in a doubtful voice.
Edie leaned closer to him and pinched him on the check.
“Why you, you dear boy!” she said with a big smile.
Before he could ask they quickly explained.
“We knew that our Karduan telepath was effected by your specific pheromones and without exposure to them she went into a coma. We then developed a way to synthesize an inhaler to keep her from relapsing. This made us wonder why you of all people she became addicted to?” Edie rationalized.
“We knew that you are what Commander Hutton calls a Psi Void and we wondered if this had something to do with it. Using the medical computer of the automated surgical station we looked at your DNA,” Angelique said and paused for moment.
“And what did you find?” Mike prompted a little concerned and curious.
“Well, it took some time as it appeared normal on a general scan but we looked harder and found some changes to your DNA,” the older doctor revealed.
He took a breath and let it out. Genetic enhancements had been around for some time and many parents were willing to have their children altered to exclude genetic diseases and to improve them. It was very costly and highly regulated. Confederation law prohibited major changes that would change the human genome but some doctors, on certain fringe planets, were willing to risk it for the right price. Mike just couldn’t see his proper, law and order parents doing anything that outrageous.
“What kind of changes?” he finally asked.
“Well that’s just it, there are thousands of subtle changes and they weren’t done to you directly. It seems that you have inherited them from one of your parents or grandparents. From what we can tell they are from your father’s side of the family.”
This made him think about how his father had distanced himself from his grandfather and the entire Collins’ side of their family. Mike didn’t know what the argument was about just that they had no contact with them and that his father didn’t want any type of relationship with his family or to even discuss it.
“Other than the Psi-Void thing, I don’t think I’m any different than anyone else,” he stated.
The two doctors both seemed to shrug uncertain what to say. They both knew that he was different - science doesn’t lie.
“And you used my DNA to create this neural block to Karduan telepathy?”
“Yes and like your pheromones it seems to work,” Angelique said.
“How could this all happen?”
“We are still studying the changes but a normal scan or even a military physical would have never have found them. It is so sophisticated that I have no idea who could have preformed such a procedure?” Dr. Beilor revealed shaking her head and marveling at his altered DNA.
“It is a question that will have to wait,” he stated and then added “will this effect my hardwire?”
“Let’s see,” Edie said taking him by the arm and leading him to an examine room.
Together the two physicians hooked him up to the diagnostic computer and monitored his inactive hardwire.
“Well, what is the verdict?’ he inquired tired of all the medical attention.
Edie nodded her gray head and smiled a little.
“It looks like your hardwire and cyber jack are stable and we could start activating its system in stages.”
“What do you mean, could?” he asked not liking the sound of that.
“She means that it takes time to adjust to the interface and physical enhancements, and you’d probably wouldn’t be able to command a ship if we proceeded,” Angelique said looking worried even though they just said he was fine.
“Well then it will have to wait until we have some down time,” he said pulling his shirt back on.
Edie Beilor nodded her agreement.
“Later would be better,” she said.
“Let’s keep all of this to ourselves,” he said not wanting his hardwire status, DNA or talk of being different to be common knowledge.
“But of course,” Angelique said as a matter of fact.
Hopping off the examination table he smiled at them with a grin that could only be called mischievous.
“What?” Dr. Duarte asked.
“Don’t I even get a lollipop for being such a good patient?”
Both women’s eyes flared in mock outrage.
“Out of my sickbay now!” Commander Beilor ordered as she looked around for her Karduan pain stick.
“How about some chocolate chip cookies?”
Angelique pushed him repeatedly guiding him to the front door.
“Hors d'ici, vous barbare nord!” she cried as she shoved him out of the door to the sickbay.
Laughing his head off, he waited there for a moment until she stuck her head out and looked for him. He kissed one last time on her soft rose-colored lips before heading down the corridor and back to his shuttle.
The flight back was mostly in silence as he pondered their revelations. By the time he got to the Randori he decided not to worry about something he couldn’t change and that he had lived with in ignorance for his entire life. As he said before, it would all just have to wait.
Chapter Four
Grand Fleet Mistress Pir-Ly of the House of Win sat unhappily in her command chair of the Star Destroyer KS 04. Her Ship Mistress busied herself with the day to day drudgery of ship duties while the Grand Mistress sat and pondered.
The human ship was out there somewhere of this she was sure of.
Some how it had destroyed and removed two entire squadrons that had been operating in this sector. Even the one that had been sent to here to find and destroy it had vanished without a trace. Some of her crew women were heard to say that the ship was some kind of spirit creature of the old legends that could consumed its enemies whole. Such gossip was childish nonsense. She could care less about what her lowly male crewmembers believed. Their opinions were not to be considered but they did mumble in hushed voices. They thought it was the work of the Redeemer and that it was now the time for him to come and set them free.
Such talk was treason and any male found repeating or thinking it was made into an example by either pain stick or a sharp lesson with patar. She almost wished she had a Prendere, a thought-seizer with them to root out the traitorous males in her squadron. She had heard that the humans called them telepaths and though she distrusted them she also knew that they had their uses.
Lady Pir-Ly had worked her way up the ranks without such a gift that would have easily cleared the way for her. Instead, she cleared her way with the point of the patar and her ability to kill with blade or with a warship. She had made a name for herself during the Karduan Internal War and had reaped further glory and honor later by defeating the first human ships. She had even planned this breakthrough of the human lines. She knew that when she wanted it, a seat on the High Council would be hers someday soon even though she wasn’t a Prendere.
First, she had to find this human ship, crush it and lay it at the feet of the council and then her lifelong goal of a seat would be fulfilled.
The Grand Fleet Mistress had her own problems that were not limited to finding this mystery ship but those within her own battle group. She had two squadrons that had been hastily put together. She should have had two star destroyers but found that only one was available, and that one was an older model that had been recently refitted. She did have two battle destroyers and the normal accompanying lesser ships. Some of them were also older ones while others were captured human vessels.
Her crews were also not what she would have wanted but again they were quickly formed to fill her ships’ rosters. She had many Karduan males that had
been trained to serve in lesser capacity on ships. She would have preferred an all female crew but that was not to be had. Some of these male were secret believers of the ancient Redeemer Prophecy, which had resurfaced over the last few years of the war and had become an ever-growing problem.
What was even more dismal was that they were forced to use human captives onboard her ships. They were all fitted with obedience collars and were closely supervised but were still totally un-trust worthy. If their technical skills weren’t needed they all would have been sent as slaves to mining worlds. Some would have gone to the Great Game to die in primitive battles, A few would have been sent to the Grand Arena to fight and die in single combat to the death against each other or against Karduan patar masters.
Allowances and exceptions had to be made after all they were not a front line fleet but one operating behind the battle area to mop up stragglers and of course find and destroy this elusive ship.
She had a strategy to flush out this Star Wolf. First she placed her faster ships in various systems within the sector to monitor and report any movement. Their orders were surveillance and survival. Even if they were destroyed or captured it would tell her where the enemy had been. She then placed some of her medium sized ships at human worlds where the attack cruiser had been seen. Unfortunately, this strategy had lost her several ships but it led her to believe that this Wolf ship would be moving on to visit the Arcadia system.
The human captain must have been a fool or very desperate as he was becoming more predictable. What choice did he have as his chances of escaping through the front lines where virtually impossible? He’d never risk venturing deeper into Karduan space, so he was stuck by his own need for supplies and survival to stay near these human fringe worlds.
The last part of her plan was the trap itself. She had placed all but a third of her remaining ships in the system. There were three stable gravity wells where a bend could be made from and she wanted them covered and ready.
One point was by the system’s sun at the center of the system. It was a type K - red dwarf star being cooler than the Earth’s yellow dwarf star. Like many systems, the inner planets were made up of mostly rock and with a few moons. The outer planets were huge being mostly gaseous with lots of moons and asteroid filled rings.
Another was the gravity well by the gas giant being a Class J - Type I or in another words a gas giant very similar to Jupiter. It had a hydrogen/helium upper atmosphere with a dense mass core and a powerful magnetosphere. At lower elevations it had ammonia crystal clouds that covered the small dense core.
The last bender point was the furthest out from the colony and was another gas giant by a planet that was often listed as an ice giant. Like Earth’s Uranus or Neptune, it was a world that was close to twenty times the size of Earth. It like other gas giants had a hydrogen and helium atmosphere but also had a large percentage of water, ammonia and methane. It was these latter elements that caused the ice to cover the surface of the world.
The Acadia colony was on habitable Class L moon circling a dense dead metal world that was the fourth from the sun. The moon was not like Earth but it had the right atmosphere for a mining colony and an industrial base. Once it was terraformed along with a hundred years of growth, then it might be a truly wonderful earth type world. Though right now it was a hard world with a population of less than five thousand workers and their families.
The planet nearby was believed to have once been a Jupiter type world. Acadia was thought to have been a gas giant, which had thousands of years ago lost its atmosphere due to hydrodynamic escape. It was now nothing more than an extremely rocky and metal world that was sometimes called a chthonian type planet. It did prove to provide a rich source of dense and very valuable metal. These metals were especially desirable in the construction of hull plating and ship armor.
This was all a game that Lady Pir-Ly had played once before to great success and she was confident it would work again. Hiding her trap was always the hardest part but with such a system it wasn’t that difficult. All she had to do was get them to move away from whatever gravity well they used to enter the system. She could have stationed ships at each well but unless they knew the exact spot that they’d enter at the enemy ship would have time to bend back out and the sentry ships would be useless. No, a trap was her best bet and just like the last time, she was sure it would be a short and successful battle. The worse part of her trap was the waiting, something her untried fleet and she would have to endure.
Task Force Trident waited as ISP Cody entered the gravity well and disappeared. Its mission was to recon the Arcadia system and then bend back out. In and out, after all that’s what it was meant to do. The task force waited as minutes went by which slowly became an hour. Mike watched his main viewer while kept his captain’s chair comm. channel open to Captain Hope on the Star Wolf. The sound wasn’t active but Collins could see that the old warrior was frowning as he contemplated his next move if the sloop didn’t return.
Mike shifted in his seat as he looked back and forth at his sections as they reported in that they were ready. All of his people were at their battle stations after they had a morning mess of steak and eggs. It was a navy thing to feed men about to die a good last meal. Everyone knew this could go very wrong but they had several advantages. The best was that they knew it was probably a trap.
Collins thought back to his own training on how to set and react to ambushes. He remembered reading of George Washington at Braddock’s Defeat in the French and Indian War. That command was almost wiped out because they didn’t listen to the people who knew how to fight the enemy. It didn’t help that the British sent their worst two regiments to fight on the American frontier. If it wasn’t for one colonial colonel named Washington, the whole British force would have been wiped out.
That was a disaster Mike thought and shook his head. A better example was from right after that war during Pontiac’s Rebellion. At the Battle of Bushy Run a relief force was sent out to save Ft. Pitt and was ambushed at a place called Bushy Run. Unlike other native surprise attacks this force was far from surprised and was even expecting such an ambush.
This time the force was made up of a mix of Pennsylvania German militia, who were mostly Lutheran immigrants and an untried Scottish regiment hastily formed due to the crisis. Their commander was Colonel Henry Bouquet, a Swiss mercenary officer serving in the British Army. He knew of the Indian tactic of ambush and he practiced his men to react to it by falling back and having the rear of his column set up a counter ambush. This allowed him to trap the would-be trappers and destroy them.
“Sir, the Cody has returned from Arcadia and has just emerged from the gravity well,” Midshipmen Jansen said from the comm. station pulling their young captain away from his thoughts of Indians and ambushes.
Mike nodded as he quickly dismissed his thoughts of distant wars and brought himself back into the present.
Moving to his office just off the bridge, he activated the computer’s command channel as the images of Hope and Hutton appeared before him on a split holo screen.
“Go ahead Alfred, report,” Captain Hope said seeing that Mike had now joined them.
“The system looks quiet,” he started, “There doesn't’ seem to be anything going on and our sensors didn’t detect anyone.
“But?” the Hawk prompted sensing that there was more.
“But it is too quiet, the system’s two defense cutters were both in orbit around the Arcadia’s moon and no shuttles were travelling between worlds with play loads of ore. Like, I said too quiet,” he reported looking grim.
“Any signs of enemy ships?” Collins asked.
“Nope, but there are so many metal worlds with either powerful magnetospheres, or high levels of ambient radiation that they could be masked from our sensors,” the former master of the sword revealed.
Hope nodded his white head and then smiled.
“We will stick to our plan and draw them out,” he said with a faint smile s
till on his weathered face.
Both Commander Hutton and Mike smiled in return as they replied with an “Aye sir.”
Returning to the bridge Mike stood by his captain’s chair.
“Prepare to bend, polarize the hull and move us to the bender point,” he ordered watching the main viewer as the Cody came about off the Wolf’s port side.
“Yes sir,” Lt. Thornton replied as he guided the Randori to the Wolf’s starboard side
“Captain, the Star Wolf is reporting that they are entering the gravity well and activating their bender drives,” Jansen announced.
“Follow them in Mr. Thornton,” Collins ordered, stepping up and taking his seat in his command chair.
“Aye sir,” he answered again.
Mike looked to his fire control officer, “Chief Baker, stand by on all weapons,”
“We are locked and loaded sir,” the gruff old CPO replied with an amused chuckle.
“Activating bender drives,” the helmsman stated as their ship disappeared into the gravity well.
Coming out of the gravity well found them in the Arcadia system at the furthest gravity well from its sun. The ice giant reminded him of Neptune as his ship joined the others heading away from the planet’s gravity field. Captain Hope wanted to be way out from Arcadia’s colony and hopefully far enough back to give them time to react and respond.
When Commander Hutton had bent in earlier, he had used the gravity well near the J-Class gas giant in the middle of the system. They were hoping that his sensors would have had a better chance of detecting any enemy ships as well as tricking the enemy into thinking that they would use the same bend point to enter the system in force.
The Star Wolf moved forward and into the system at full impulse. The Cody followed trying to keep up with the fast attack cruiser. Mike was sure that his ship could have kept up with the Wolf as an express freighter was built for both long bends with fast in-system fusion drives.
“Half maneuver drives,” Mike ordered and then added, “We’ll let the Wolf and Cody get ahead of us a bit.”
Wolf's Run: The Chase of War (Star Wolf Sqaudron Book 2) Page 12
