"Oh."
"I thought we weren't doing oh anymore?"
I debated the relative wisdom of calling an AI a smartarse. It took so long the moment passed completely, so no comment seemed necessary.
A channel opened the moment we jumped into Cobol.
"Bloody hell Hunter! You took your own sweet time getting back here."
He looked vaguely familiar. But I wasn’t sure if I’d talked to him before or not.
"What can I do for you?"
"You can stop that oversized pile of junk you're in, and fight me."
"Fight you why?"
"You sent us all to our deaths! I'm the only one who survived, and I spent three miserable months hiding on Azgard trying to fix my ship."
"Why were you hiding?"
"From the Midgard patrols, stupid."
"For three months? The war didn’t last that long."
"Well I didn’t know that, did I?"
The urge to face-palm arose once more.
"So why do you want to fight me?"
"Because of all the mates of mine who died. You sent us there. You knew we wouldn’t survive. I demand satisfaction!"
What was he? A throwback to the Knights of the Round Table?
I felt more than heard BA stirring behind me, not that I'd been aware anyone had come in. I held up a hand to her, trying to head off the inevitable 'Over my dead body' comment I knew was coming.
"Well I'm not stopping. So if you want to pick a fight, you either start shooting now, or we leave it for another day."
"I'm not taking you on in a ship, for fucks sake. I mean dueling swords at dawn."
He was some sort of throwback, but I wasn't sure where to. No-one had fought sword duels in who knows how long.
I sighed.
"Fine, come on board. But be careful, as I'm not slowing down for you. Park in one of the Flight Deck bays. I'll send someone to escort you up."
The channel closed.
"You aren't serious about fighting a duel, are you?" asked BA.
"You don’t think I'm up to it?"
She hesitated, obviously considering something.
"Is this a trick question?"
I laughed. So did everyone else who had come in.
"Let's just see what this bozo has in mind when he gets here. And besides, it's not like I've not had any experience with a sword."
"It's not the same thing," said Dick. I turned to look at him. "A sword which cuts everything isn’t exactly a teaching tool on how to defend against another sword. And if he wants to duel, presumably he has his own set of dueling swords."
"Let's wait and see."
The bounty hunter ship was rapidly approaching now. He'd lined up on the front Flight Deck entrance, being the easiest to enter at the speed I was going. Actually the only way of entering at the speed I was going.
Jane popped up screens so we could watch him landing.
He sailed in safely enough, given the front entrance was the smallest, and was fine until he tried to set down on the deck.
His ship cartwheeled. And kept on flipping over the length of the Flight Deck, until it fell out the back entrance, and tumbled away behind us.
"What an idiot," said Lacey, from his seat in Camel. "Even the shuttle pilots knew to turn one eighty as soon as they entered, and thrust as hard as possible, before setting down. Silly git was still thrusting forwards."
"Guess he'd never landed on a Carrier before," said George, from Custer. The laugh was only just controlled.
I nodded to Jane, and she sent an SR droid and salvage droid after the obviously damaged ship. The salvage droid could tow it somewhere to be repaired, or tow it to Hunter's Redoubt if its owner had just killed himself. The SR droid was in case his life support was now down, as it could keep him alive long enough to get him somewhere.
I had one of those thoughts. The ones which really bother you.
"Spill it," said Amanda, who'd obviously seen it cross my mind.
"It occurred to me, in spite of all the military might we can gather at the moment; when prophesy gets here, everything might hang on the actions of idiots like that."
"Fuck!" said BA.
That said it all really.
Thirty Six
As it happened, the next briefing was delayed slightly, until we were in the Midnight system. Jane had been doing some experiments with how far we could stretch the real time communications aspect of the comnavsats, and found Midnight was about as far from Nexus as was useful.
O'Neil was waiting for us in a shuttle, and we swallowed it as we blew past Hunter's Redoubt. His XO-wife was with him. He brought me up to date with happenings since I'd left, which amounted to, not much.
Once again, the theatre was full. This time, the whole Alpha team was present, along with Sam and the other team leaders, including the Canadian Colonel, and his team leader Major. Lacey and Brown were also present, as were their Canadian counterparts. Greer and Miriam were seated behind their superiors. In effect, everyone from Major up was here, and everyone close to me.
On the wall used for flat screens and hollo projection, were the faces of those not able to be here in person. General Harriman, David Tollin, and Eric Nielsen, looked down on us.
I let Annabelle and Jack run the briefing as they had before, and stood where I could see everyone.
There were no questions this time. Just silent people absorbing information. It's possible the lower ranks didn’t feel like they could ask questions, but I'd have expected extrovert personalities like the twins and BA to ask if they wanted an answer to something, and they didn’t.
The silence continued after the last vid was watched, and the last word said. I looked around the room. This was a group of the most experienced military and exploration people from the whole spine. And the task before us left them completely silent?
Finally I felt it necessary to induce some movement.
"I suggest everyone breaks up into their own groups and discusses what we think we should be doing to prepare. Submit any ideas, suggestions, questions, strategy, and tactics, whatever; up your chain of command. The four stars will meet in a few hours' time to discuss what people come up with."
Looking at their faces, I wasn’t too hopeful anything useful was going to come of it. Which would leave the people at the top to actually come up with all the responses. Personally, I wasn’t sure that was the best idea either. At the top, you tended to lose sight of the mud at the bottom of the trenches, and it was the mud which would define how successful we would be against prophesy.
"Thank you all for coming."
I turned to the faces on the wall.
Bring Eric's ship with you. He will want his family with him.
I ignored the voice, and looked at Walter.
"General, can you have anyone you want to come with us to Outback ready to go as soon as we arrive? There's accommodation for you on Unassailable, where all the delegations are quartered."
"We'll be ready."
"Jane will be in touch when the four stars meeting will be. Give us a couple of hours to digest things."
"I've missed these little get together's of yours," he said with a grin, before his face winked out.
"David, you better bring your family with you."
"Already ready. I just need a ship, unless you intend docking?"
"No, I'm not docking. The timing will be too damn close to lose any time at all."
"Got that right Jon. It's bad enough having to wait for the Door to open to confront a Keeper finally, but having to wait for you to get here as well? That’s intolerable!"
He said it with a huge grin on his face, but in actual fact, he was spot on. If I’d been waiting for him, I'd have expressed the same thing. His face blinked out.
"Eric, I hope you don’t mind being used as a taxi service?"
"No problems. I thought we'd be using shuttles though."
"Kali wants you and your ship with us."
"Does she now. I wonder why."
"No idea, yet. Do you know Jessie Ball?"
"Sure. Haven't seen her in donkey's years, as we usually work different ends of the spine. Why?"
"She's on board, with her ship, a brand new Camel. Could be Kali has something for you both to do soon."
"I'm in. Perhaps we'll finally be able to scan the Outback system properly?"
"Maybe so. We'll get told when we get told."
"I get told regularly."
We both chuckled.
"Anyway," he continued, "after I see this magical archive of yours, and your computer collection."
"Yes. Bring your family as well."
"Ah. Okay, I’d not considered that. Just as well you're not here for a bit. The missus is going to want to move most of what we just finished moving onto the station, back aboard Nascaspider. Not sure if she'll be pleased or not. She made a big fuss of moving in the first place."
"Good luck with that. Can you be the taxi for the General and his people, and also David and his family?"
"No problemo. You will slow down enough for me to dock safely? Or should I simply load up as fast as possible and meet you at Outback Orbital?"
I thought for a moment, doing the math, but another thought intruded. For my next Carrier, I needed to make sure Corvettes at least, could dock using the front door. Maybe Frigates too. The need to scoop at speed was sometimes necessary, and the ones I most needed to dock, couldn’t do so at speed.
"If the General and David can be ready in time, go for Outback Orbital. Dock as soon as we arrive, on the right side Flight Deck entrance. Tag'Em is in the left. David will give you the exact timing. I'm hoping to arrive as soon as I can before the Door officially opens, but we're cutting it awful close. Jane will know as soon as you leave the station, so I don’t need to be told. Just be there before us, or be waiting on the line between the Bad Wolf jump point and the Outback jump point."
"Will do. See you soon."
His face vanished as well. I looked around and found only two people left. Both of them were grinning like Cheshire cats. The lock on the door clicked. The cats shed their fur. I sighed heavily, but gave in to fate.
Thirty Seven
"So," began Bigglesworth. "Jon. What's your feeling on where and when prophesy will manifest?"
"Honestly? If it’s a celestial event, then through one of the four side systems. Most likely the ones in Corporate and Canadian space, because they are on the core-ward side of the arm, and I'd expect an event of the magnitude we expect, to come from the core itself, expanding outward."
"And if it's an invasion?" asked Patton.
"If it's an invasion, it will be through a jump point we know nothing about yet. As such, it could be any of them."
"Can we narrow it down at all?" asked Walter, with us again via vid.
We were in the original Deck One Conference Room, which Jane had redecorated to have a smaller table, but about half the room devoted to lounge chairs. Conferences tended to happen in the newer and larger room made during the refit, so this one was now outfitted more as a Senior Officers Conference room.
"Possibly," I said. "I'm currently building the AMS a new Drone Cruiser for use as an Explorer ship. The idea is instead of scouring a system using one ship and one jump point detector, you use a big ship and dozens of drones, each with a detector. Once it's ready, I'll ask John to test it in each of our six suspect sectors. If we find additional jump points in any one of them, the threat level can be raised there."
"But you don’t like this idea for some reason," stated Price.
"You noticed. Damn, I was trying to keep my game face on. I guess it needs work."
They all chuckled.
"Yes, I have reservations. On the one hand, we need to know if there are more jump points or not, since a threat coming from somewhere we can't anticipate will be significantly harder to counter. On the other hand, if we find more systems, we may be able to gain a bigger buffer zone when something shows up."
I paused, and they waited for me.
"On the gripping hand though, discovering new jump points leading to new systems, may bring on what we fear most. We may actually discover a phobic alien species, or a virulent disease, or something we can't even imagine. So we might trigger prophesy, just by trying to quantify it."
"What's this gripping hand you mention?" asked Tremblay.
"Sorry. Three armed alien, from a book I once read. It stuck in my mind, and it comes out whenever there are three options. The alien had two arms on one side of the body, both with tool using hands, and a single much larger arm on the other side, fitted with a gripping hand for heavy lifting. One hand," I waved my right hand high, "other hand," I waved my right hand low, "gripping hand," I balled my left hand into a fist.
I grinned, but only Price really understood it. Unlike so many, it had been one book to constantly be republished across six hundred years. Its sequel on the other hand was much harder to come across.
"So you think we may trigger prophesy by trying to quantify it?" asked Jedburgh.
"It's possible."
"It bothers you, but not enough to argue against not doing it," stated Walter.
I waggled my head from side to side a couple of times.
"Yeah. I can't help feeling like we already triggered it, and while the possibilities exist, exploring further won't actually make anything worse. But I can't quantify this at all. It's just a gut feeling."
"Maybe when we hear what the Prophesy is," said Patton, "we'll understand it all better."
"I really hope so!" I exclaimed.
"I wondered if there was something more we could do to define the vector the threat is coming from?" asked Bigglesworth.
"You had a suggestion?" asked Price.
"I was wondering if Jon's nightmare could be used to define the system somehow."
"I could make up models of the six systems," offered Jane through coms. "Jon could then watch a motion display of how each system looks through a period of time, looking for something to become familiar to him. But it would require a ship to visit each system, and gather the data. It would likely be a month or more before I had all the data I needed."
"Worth doing," I said. "Assuming we have a month. Get on it."
"Confirmed."
"The twins can view them too. They've seen the nightmare enough now to know the basic scene when they see it."
"Twins?" asked Tremblay.
"My Major's Peck. Joint team leaders for my Marine Team One. We have some weird bond which defies explanation at this point. Whenever I have prophesy based nightmares, both of them see them as well."
He didn’t look like he understood, but I wasn’t going to discuss it further.
Four star eyes met across the room, and settled on me.
"No," I said.
They all laughed.
"Sorry Jon," said Bigglesworth. "But one day that no will have to be yes."
"May that day be a long way off then."
"No argument. But that wasn’t what I wanted to ask you."
"Shoot."
"Assume for the moment all our sector's military assets were under your command, and you had no-one else to fall back on to make deployment decisions. How would you deploy to face what we are guessing is coming?"
I sighed. If they wanted to play this game, I guess I could oblige.
"First, I'd divide my forces in half. The first half go to the Famine system, on the watch for an incursion from Death. Should one occur, they would jump into Pestilence and get as much information as possible, before falling back to a better fighting position.
They nodded.
"The other half of my forces would again be divided in half. One half would remain in Nexus, bolstering the existing garrison. The other half would go to Dead Man's Chest."
More nods.
"I'd send the entire British fleet to Victoria, to support the Canadian Fleet. The American fleet would be divided in half. One half would also go to Victoria, and the other half to Nexus
."
"And where would you be?" asked Bigglesworth.
"Depends on any new jump points found. When Slice's new Cruiser is complete, its first job will be rescanning Nexus. Eric Nielsen has been remapping the entire Australian sector for the last six months, and found exactly zero new. But the new drone Cruiser should be able to cover even further out than has been done anywhere to date."
"That didn’t answer the question," said Walter, with a grin.
"If we find a new jump point in Nexus, most likely I'll be there. If they don’t, I'll be in Famine."
"And how do you see each scenario playing out?" asked Bigglesworth.
I guess he was the senior four star. I’d never actually checked who had the seniority here. All I knew was I was the junior as far as time in rank was concerned.
"If the threat comes through Nexus, the fleet fights to contain as long as possible at the emergence point. If containment isn’t possible, the remains of my fleet will fall back to Outback if possible. The remains of the American fleet fall back to Bad Wolf, and run a harassment retreat for as long as they can."
I looked around the room at them all.
"If they come through Nexus, the Australian sector is lost, and probably most people will die. I don’t see any other way the scenario will play out. If we have any warning, we may be able to save all the stations and whoever is on them at the time, but nothing much else."
Walter nodded. I guess he'd come to the same conclusion.
"If this happens, my guess is I'll die at the Outback jump point, and it will fall to all of you to try and save your people."
Walter nodded again. My guess is he would be on the best Australian sector ship they could build before then, and would go down fighting before the Sydney jump point.
Our eyes met for a moment.
"If the threat comes through Victoria, I'm sorry to say the Canadian system is likely a lost cause. Once again, we might be able to save some stations from the close systems, but I’d see whatever fleet is there falling back into Vancouver fairly rapidly."
I looked at Tremblay.
"I'm sorry, but you lucked out if they come that way. One small sector is not sufficient reason for mounting a last stand, when all it does is reduce our fighting capacity for the battles me might win later. Or at least have a decent chance of delay, while people escape another bottleneck."
Hunter Legacy 9: Hero at the Gates Page 20
