The Little Ships (Alexis Carew Book 3)

by J. A. Sutherland

  “Still, there’s the question of what to do with you. Curtice believes you need some time to yourself, some time to rest. What do you think of that?”

  “I think, sir, that Lieutenant Curtice is not the best judge of what I need,” Alexis said, glad that the conversation had turned again.

  “And what do you think you need at this time?”

  “To be busy and useful, sir,” she said. It was no more than the truth. “This enforced idleness here on Lesser Itchthorpe doesn’t sit well with me.”

  Cammack nodded. “What I’d wish myself,” he murmured. “Still and all, there’s Curtice’s recommendations I have to take into account and he doesn’t rate you fit for another commission here on the border where there’s so much fighting still.”

  So he meant to send her away from the war. To be the junior lieutenant on some ship far from Hanover. Alexis wasn’t at all sure how she’d be able to take some time of endless patrols in peaceful space. All because of that damned Curtice. She was so caught up in anger at the man that she nearly missed the Admiral Cammack’s next words and it took her a moment to understand their import.

  “— Nightingale’s commander, Lieutenant Borrowman, is asking for leave … some sort of family issue, it seems. With everyone anxious to come to the war zone and, frankly, our need of them, it’s been difficult to find someone to take his place. Only a lieutenant’s command, a little revenue cutter, but far enough from any real fighting that it seems to fit Curtice’s concerns nicely.”

  A revenue cutter? They were such small ships, commanded by a lieutenant and having only a pair of midshipmen as other officers. If she was appointed into that, it would have to be as …

  “Best for you, I think, Carew. Give you a bit of time in command in a more relaxed setting than the neck-or-nothing dashes you’ve had in those prizes you’ve commanded. Nightingale has a pair of good midshipmen aboard to offer you support and a decent crew … well, as decent as may be with the war on.” He raised his eyebrows. “It is important and useful work, you know. Smuggling cuts into the tax base and without taxes there’re no funds for the Navy to fight this war, you understand?”

  “Yes, sir, I understand. Thank you.” Her own ship! Appointed into it properly, even. No matter how small it was still both an honor and a sign of confidence in her that Cammack would do this.

  “Oh, and your stars seem to have aligned even further with this,” Cammack went on. “Nightingale’s based out of Zariah — that would make her patrol sector include that Dalthus system you’re from, I think. Not often the Navy gives us a chance to visit home, Carew, so best take advantage of it.”

  Alexis took a deep breath, feeling as though a huge weight had been lifted from her. A command, work to do, and a chance to visit home.

  “Settled then,” Cammack said. “I’ll have the orders cut and forwarded to you. You can be on the first packet going that direction.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Alexis took that for her dismissal and rose to leave, but she paused at the hatchway. She hadn’t felt nearly the same reluctance to talk with the admiral as she had with Curtice. It seemed as though he understood, and she risked asking at least one of the questions she was afraid of having an answer to.

  “Does it ever get easier to bear, sir?”

  Cammack stared at her a moment and she was certain he understood completely. Had felt what she’d been feeling since Giron.

  The admiral drained his glass.

  “Given the costs … I should bloody well hope not, don’t you?”

  * * *

  Alexis made her way back to her rooms. With every step she wanted to pull out her tablet and check that Admiral Cammack’s orders were real and not a dream. She was getting a ship, her own ship, and properly assigned into it, not just a prize command — something unthinkably rare for an eighteen-year old lieutenant. Surely it would be a small ship, only a revenue cutter, but still it was a command. And more than that, she was going home. Patrolling the sector would allow her to visit Dalthus every few weeks and spend time with her grandfather. It was like a huge weight lifted from her shoulders.

  “Isom!” she called as she approached her rooms. The news was good for him as well. This commission would place them in the same sector for months, perhaps a year or more, and with a regular patrol schedule. There were certain to be solicitors on Zariah they could speak to who could coordinate with Grandy on Penduli and possibly challenge Isom’s enlistment by the Impress Service.

  “That Mister Dansby was by, sir,” Isom said, coming out of her rooms.

  Alexis’ smile fell. Dansby had followed Cammack’s fleet to Lesser Itchthorpe. She hadn’t spoken to him, but he’d been constantly about for some reason, always catching her eye. She’d begun to wonder if the man was stalking her.

  “Is he still here?”

  Isom shook his head. “No, sir, but he left you some’at.”

  Alexis frowned. “What is it?”

  “It’s wrapped, on your cot, sir. He left a note, as well.”

  Alexis hesitated at the hatch to her rooms.

  “I don’t suppose you thought to scan it for explosives?” She waved Isom away. “No, never mind. That man’s clever enough to get around that somehow.”

  She slid the hatch shut behind her, best to deal with whatever Dansby had left her with before telling Isom the good news. The package, little more than half a meter square, was wrapped in brown paper. She pulled a folded note from its top and read:

  Rikki,

  I’ve just heard you’ll be captaining a revenue cutter, dealing with the serpents and vipers such as I (was, now utterly and wholly reformed, of course).

  Alexis stopped reading and snorted astonishment. How fast the rumor mill worked on-station or on a ship was astounding. She’d barely stopped on her way from Admiral Cammack’s quarters, and yet Dansby had the whole of it, and with time to write a note.

  Perhaps you’ll have need of an ally in your future endeavors — and a reminder of your place in things.

  A. Dansby

  Alexis frowned and parted the paper from the top of the package, exposing a box made of wire mesh. She jumped backward as a tiny face appeared behind the mesh.

  Soft, brown eyes gleamed as they reflected the light and she could make out a lithe, furry body ending in a tail, bottle-brush thick in agitation. The face disappeared in a rustle of movement as a soft chittering came to her ear.

  “Isom!” she called out, shaking her head. “We’ll need to pack … and I’d admire it did you discover to me what one feeds a bloody mongoose!”

  A Note from the Author

  Thank you for reading The Little Ships. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

  If you did and would like to further support the series, please consider leaving a brief review on the purchase site or a review/rating on Goodreads. Reviews are the lifeblood of independent authors and let other readers know what books they might enjoy.

  If you’d like to be notified of future releases, please consider following me on Twitter or Facebook, or joining my mailing list (all of which are linked to at www.alexiscarew.com). The mailing list is limited to no more than one or two updates a month and everyone subscribed will receive a free ebook copy of Planetfall the Alexis Carew novella when it’s released.

  I’d like to take this opportunity to thank my readers who are native speakers of French or German for your patience. I know I’ve taken some liberties with your respective languages, choosing, in some cases, not quite the best translation in order to make some things more understandable to English speakers via context. And to those English speakers for your patience with so much French and German. :)

  Inspiration for The Little Ships, and its title, came primarily from the evacuation of British and French troops from Dunkirk in May/June of 1940.

  With the whole of the British Expeditionary Force, what remained of Belgian forces, and three French armies trapped with their backs to the English Channel, the Allies
undertook the task of evacuating over 300,000 men across the English Channel. Hundreds of boats responded to the call — from the merchant marine, fishing and pleasure craft, and even lifeboats. Civilian and Naval forces worked together to accomplish one of the most remarkable boat lifts in history.

  Even the weather cooperated to a certain extent, with cloud cover that kept the German air force from being as much of a threat as it should have been and the Channel itself remaining unseasonably calm.

  Those Little Ships, many of which still sail, even have their own flag, the Dunkirk Jack, which can only be flown by civilian ships that took part in the operation.

  The Dunkirk Jack: The St George's Cross defaced with the arms of Dunkirk

  In naming the fictional ships participating in the evacuation of Giron, I used several from real ships that participated in the evacuation of Dunkirk. Most notably the three packets, Mona’s Queen, Fenella, and King Orry. At Dunkirk, these three ships were among the sixteen vessels from the Isle of Man Steam Packet Company that participated in the evacuation, and all three were lost on May 29th, 1940.

  As well, the Royal Daffodil was a real ship and made seven trips across the Channel to rescue between seven and nine thousand men — the most of any ship in the campaign.

  The reaction to Dunkirk, by all rights, should have been one of despair. The allied armies were defeated, driven not only to the coast, but into the very sea, and had to evacuate across the Channel before a seemingly unbeatable foe.

  The people of England didn’t seem to see it that way. The soldiers from Dunkirk were greeted by celebrating crowds on their return. The mood was so optimistic, in fact, that Winston Churchill gave one of his most famous speeches, not so much to raise morale, but to remind people of the long, hard war yet to be fought.

  We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

  In addition to Dunkirk, I drew on the 1793 Siege of Toulon. French Republican armies — including, notably, a young artillery officer by the name of Napoleon — surrounded the town, which the British had previously taken and which had become a haven for French Royalists. As the British evacuated they took with them some 14,000 civilians, but still had to leave many more behind — some of whom were summarily executed by the Republican forces.

  There may also be some parallels there to more recent conflicts, regardless of your thoughts on the right or wrong of them, and the question of what debt is owed to local forces and civilians who assist or rise up with an expectation of promised support.

  J.A. Sutherland

  New Orleans, LA

  August 1, 2015

  About the Author

  J.A. Sutherland spends his time sailing the Bahamas on a 43' 1925 John G. Alden sailboat called Little Bit ...

  Yeah ... no. In his dreams.

  Reality is a townhouse in Orlando with a 90 pound huskie-wolf mix who won't let him take naps.

  When not reading or writing, he spends his time on roadtrips around the Southeast US searching for good barbeque.

  To be notified when new releases are available, follow J.A. Sutherland on Facebook, Twitter, or subscribe to the author’s newsletter via the website. Newsletter subscribers will receive a free ebook copy of Planetfall when it’s released.

  @JASutherlandBks

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  www.alexiscarew.com

  sutherland@alexiscarew.com

  Also by J.A. Sutherland

  To be notified when new releases are available, follow J.A. Sutherland on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/alexiscarewbooks), Twitter (https://twitter.com/JASutherlandBks), or subscribe to the author’s newsletter (http://bit.ly/sutherlandlist).

  Into the Dark

  (Alexis Carew #1)

  Mutineer

  (Alexis Carew #2)

  The Little Ships

  (Alexis Carew #3)

  HMS Nightingale

  (Alexis Carew #4)

  Coming in 2016

  Planetfall

  (A Story of the Dark)

  Coming soon.

  Wronged

  (A Story of the Dark)

  Coming soon.

  New London Monetary System

  The basic monetary unit of New London is the pound, though most items in the Fringe Worlds cost considerably less than this; at least those produced on the planet or nearby. The pound is further divided into shillings and pence.

  12 pence = 1 shilling

  20 shillings = 1 pound

  21 shillings = 1 guinea (1 pound, 1 shilling)

  The pence is further divided into half-pence (1/2 pence) and farthings (1/4 pence).

  Darkspace

  The perplexing problem dated back centuries, to when mankind was still planet-bound on Earth. Scientists, theorizing about the origin of the universe, recognized that the universe was expanding, but made the proposal that the force that had started that expansion would eventually dissipate, causing the universe to then begin contracting again. When they measured this, however, they discovered something very odd — not only was the expansion of the universe not slowing, but it was actually increasing.

  This meant that something, something unseen, was continuing to apply energy to the universe’s expansion. More energy than could be accounted for by what their instruments could detect. At the same time, they noticed that there seemed to be more gravitational force than could be accounted for by the observable masses of stars, planets, and other objects.

  There seemed to be quite a bit of the universe that simply couldn’t be seen. Over ninety percent of the energy and matter that had to make up the universe, in fact.

  They called these dark energy and dark matter, for want of a better term.

  Then, as humanity began serious utilization of near-Earth space, they made another discovery.

  Lagrangian points were well-known in orbital mechanics. With any two bodies where one is orbiting around the other, such as a planet and a moon, there are five points in space where the gravitational effects of the two bodies provide precisely the centripetal force required to keep an object, if not stationary, then relatively so.

  Humanity first used these points to build a space station at L1, the Lagrangian point situated midway between Earth and the Moon, thus providing a convenient stopover for further exploration of the Moon. This was quickly followed by a station at L2, the point on the far side of the moon, roughly the same distance from it as L1. Both of these stations began reporting odd radiation signatures. Radiation that had no discernible source, but seemed to spring into existence from within the Lagrangian points themselves.

  Further research into this odd radiation began taking place at the L4 and L5 points, which led and trailed the Moon in its orbit by about sixty degrees. More commonly referred to as Trojan Points, L4 and L5 are much larger in area than L1 and L2 and, it was discovered, the unknown radiation was much more intense.

  More experimentation, including several probes that simply disappeared when their hulls were charged with certain high-energy particles, eventually led to one of those probes reappearing — and the discovery of darkspace, along with the missing ninety-five percent of the universe.

  Dark energy that moved through it like winds. Usually blowing directly toward a star system from all directions, pushing those systems farther and farther apart, but sometimes coming in storms that could drive a ship far off course. Dark matter that permeated the space, slowing anything, even light, outside of a ship’s hull and field.

 

 

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