Hunter Legacy 11: Home Is Where the Hero Is

by Timothy Ellis

  I stopped abruptly as a thought occurred to me.

  "Oh FUCK!"

  "Sir?"

  "Sorry. I had one of those thoughts you never want to have. It shouldn’t affect your orders though. At some point we need to find out what happened to that Battleship which got past us, and if need be, destroy it. But that won't happen until we have a big enough fleet there. But it also needs to happen sooner rather than later, so we can safely go into War, and start moving asteroids away from the jump point. Anyway, until someone senior arrives, or you get new orders from me, you will command the blockade of the War jump point."

  "Yes sir! May I ask a question?"

  "Sure."

  "What happens if Doctor Magnus turns up and wants to go through?"

  "String her along with official nonsense while you get a grav sled attached to her ship, and then have her towed back to Treasure Chest. Put her in touch with me. Worst case scenario? No-one goes through that jump point without my explicit permission, and you will check with me first. Don’t take anyone's word for it, and don’t trust anything which is supposed to be from me. Send it through your AI to Jane, and don’t accept anything back without it having come from Jane through your AI."

  "What if someone goes through anyway?"

  "You go through after them, and you shoot to disable. If that isn’t possible, you destroy the ship, and bring back any survivors. Can you do that?"

  "Yes sir. If I couldn’t, I’d never have joined the military in the first place."

  I nodded to her. Circumstances had led me there. It was nice to know someone had actually considered such things before choosing the life.

  "I'll let you get acquainted with your new ship. Take as long as you need for trials, and make sure everything works before you accept the ship from Bob. I'll get you together with Slice before you both leave, and make sure you're both on the same page."

  She arose, and saluted me. I returned the salute, and left the CCC.

  I let Jane fly Gunbus back to Hunter's Haven.

  It was a beginning. But there was so much to do in so little time.

  Forty Two

  Back in my office, I demanded Thirteen show himself. I'd done a lot of thinking on the way back, and practically choked on lunch.

  "You needed me for something?"

  "Yes. I want to see the trigger event for letting loose the Darkness. One said we did it. I want to see it."

  "How do you know it's already happened?"

  "I don’t know for sure. All the same, I want to see it."

  "I doubt she'll show you."

  "Let her tell me that."

  One appeared as I thought she might. If things were as they were claimed, she'd be watching everything closely, especially me.

  "No need," she said. "I've been waiting for this particular penny to drop. So Admiral, you think you know?"

  "You tell me."

  "Give me one word to convince me you're ready."

  "Battleship."

  Thirteen looked confused.

  "You are indeed ready."

  She waved a hand, and an image appeared on the wall. BigMother down jumped into the New Hope system, with Prometheus docked to her front. A Battleship fired on her, and then jumped out. The image followed the Battleship. It collided with the huge asteroid on the other side, bouncing off with some obvious damage, but continuing on in system above the plane of the asteroid field. The image sped up to save us time and boredom, as the ship moved towards the next jump point. Then it froze.

  One looked at me.

  "What do you think happened at this point?"

  I thought back. Twenty-twenty hindsight is a wonderful thing.

  "They disabled their ship ID."

  "Correct. Why?"

  "They hoped we'd think they'd been destroyed by an asteroid and so we wouldn't come after them?"

  "Correct again."

  The image moved forward again at an accelerated pace, and the ship jumped again. We followed it across the Famine system, and into Pestilence. Something changed, and the image froze again. One looked at me.

  "Fuck!"

  "Probably a fair comment, if crude."

  "I don’t understand what I'm looking at," said Thirteen.

  "He does," said One, indicating me.

  "They brought the special shielding online. The new version which Magnus developed, and they took from her ship when they dismantled it, before we arrived there."

  "Correct again."

  The image moved rapidly across the Pestilence system, and jumped into Death.

  And it ended.

  "What happened then?" I demanded.

  "I can't show you that," said One. "There are places where even my avatar cannot go. The system you call Death is one such. Very few beings can survive there, and it includes constructs such as our avatars are. To find out what happened next, we will need to call someone else here."

  She vanished. And reappeared moments later with a small dark withered looking man, with a long white beard, who had the look and feel of the Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime about him. He wasn’t just old. Even the word ancient didn’t do him justice.

  "This is Death," said One. "Or at least he is the pulsar's avatar. His name is a fairly large number, which would be pointless to use. Just call him Death."

  "Can you show us what happened to the Battleship in your system?" I asked him.

  "I can. But it won't tell you much."

  He waved to the wall, and the image continued, showing us the ship crossing the system, giving the pulsar a lot of distance. Sped up as it was, we could still see the shields as they slowly deteriorated. But before they failed, the ship jumped out.

  One thanked Death, and he vanished.

  "That’s what happened to the Battleship."

  "What happened to it next?"

  "FORBIDDEN!" boomed the voice of Kali, seemingly echoing around the room.

  "Why?" I demanded.

  "You are not ready to know more," answered One.

  "Why not?"

  I was getting angry now.

  "Any more would violate the rules about knowing anything to do with your own future," said Thirteen quietly.

  "Fuck that," I responded. "Throw me a bone will you? How am I supposed to fix things when I don’t know how they got broken?"

  "You do the best you can with what you do know."

  I had to make a serious effort not to hit her. I could feel myself losing it again. The inner caveman was warring with my spiritual side.

  "Do you understand?" she went on.

  "Yes."

  And I did. There was only one scenario which fit. The Darkness was somewhere on the other side of Death, and whatever they were, they lacked the shielding to come through that system. The Battleship had taken what they needed to them. I had to assume this was unwittingly, but who knew? I turned on Thirteen.

  "Did you know?"

  He looked sheepish, giving me my answer.

  "Not immediately. When the Battleship jumped into War, I was curious and followed it. By the time it jumped into Death, where I couldn’t go without your ship to protect me, I'd guessed. I knew nothing about the special shielding though. As far as I knew, they all died on the other side like Prometheus' crew."

  "And you didn’t think to tell me?"

  "I couldn’t."

  "You couldn't?" I yelled at him. "You knew. We could have gone back after it and destroyed it, and stopped this whole Darkness thing before it began."

  "Ah. No."

  I rounded on One.

  "What do you mean no?"

  "I mean no. Yes you could have destroyed that ship. But it wouldn’t have solved the problem."

  "Why not?" I interrupted her.

  "Magnus and her people had the designs for the shielding. Within a year, they would have sent another ship. It would have crossed Death, and jumped through to the other side like the Battleship did, with the same result. Even if you had blockaded the system, someone would have run it eventually
, and succeeded in going through. But in all likelihood, you wouldn’t have blockaded the system until too late, and not known you'd already missed."

  I stared at her, trying not to believe her.

  "And besides," she went on, "in all the versions of these events, while humans were the trigger more often than not, it wasn’t always the case. Regardless, someone triggers the Darkness, and human space is affected immediately. Always until now, resulting in the extinction of your species, and every form of life you know about."

  I sighed heavily.

  "Isn't there something we can do to stop it?"

  "Nothing. This timeline must proceed as it is."

  "But we could have used more time."

  "Time is not important. Only life is important."

  "And you think we have enough time?"

  "We will see."

  This time I did hit her.

  Forty Three

  I called Aline out of her training session at boot camp, and she spent the next hour massaging me on our bed. While she eased the tension out of me, I pondered it now being our bed. She'd become quite good at massage, and knew exactly where I needed it and how. Of course, she wanted to know what had set me back so badly, but for now at least, I'd decided there was no point in anyone knowing what the trigger event was. Things were bad enough without people seizing on it as a mistake, and wanking away on the issue to such an extent it interfered with what needed doing.

  The following hour was lost to reciprocating, but had little to do with formal massage. We were in the shower after, when the invitation to dinner at the Australia Militia Officer's Mess arrived. I countered with a meeting immediately with Walter, and the heads of the weapon development teams, in the conference facilities in the Hunter tower.

  Aline went back to her training schedule. Angel was nowhere to be found, and Jane informed me she was at a playdate with the other station cats in Cat Zone.

  The next two hours was intensive. It was mainly for the development team heads, but I was delegating supervision of them to Walter. I hadn't asked him, but it was obvious it was fine with him as soon as I started talking. I outlined the situations we needed counters for.

  All we really knew was that something was coming, sufficient to turn empty space into black. Now this might seem silly, since space is black, but it really isn’t. Space is alive in colour, depending on where you are, and the direction you look. Each nebulae is unique. Each sun breaks up the black of the void.

  We had no idea what was coming. I started them thinking across the whole spectrum. I had them think as the Captain of a ship, facing what was coming at them. If the threat was fifty thousand missiles all coming at once, we needed a response which didn’t end with the ship destroyed. If it was fifty thousand small ships, we needed another response. If it was one hundred really huge ships, we needed something else. At the moment, any of these scenarios would end with toast, or more likely, burnt crumbs.

  Space combat games had always had some sort of torpedo designed to kill really big, really well protected ships. There were also huge area affecting missiles, where anything in the detonation range would be destroyed or damaged. We didn’t have either. We'd never had anything big enough, or in numbers enough, to warrant needing such killer torpedo or missiles. Now we did. At the very least, we needed a torpedo which could destroy BigMother with a single hit. And I was talking about something much, much, bigger.

  There was fiction out there where ships fired tens of thousands of small missiles all at once. So far, we could fire thousands at once in one hundred batches. But the point was, if someone did, how could we prevent them killing us through sheer numbers? Or sheer speed? Or impact damage we could not actually conceive of now?

  The possibilities were endless. And we needed to cover all of them. At the end of the meeting, all eyes in the room were glazed over, but I saw some glimmers of ideas. We did have the specs now for the faster and harder hitting missiles we'd encountered in the Gaia system. We also had examples of how to do non-ship launcher systems.

  Walter and I left them to light fires under their teams, and we headed to the Officer's club.

  My father was waiting there for us. We updated him on the progress of the meeting, and we kept talking tactics and strategy until late into the evening. One of us would throw out a problem, and the others would come up with a counter, or tear apart the problem into smaller problems.

  It gave me an idea. Once back in my office, I opened a new vid.

  "Greetings," I said. "Nothing new to report. But I have a suggestion for everyone. I'd like each of you to think up the worst possible scenario you think we could face, and outline it to everyone. Each of us would then respond to it, with anything which comes to mind. The more possibilities we think of which could confront us, the more counters we can come up with. By all means bring in trusted juniors. By all means tell us why something won't happen as it was proposed. But try and counter it anyway. We need ideas, we need people working on countering all the bad things which might happen, and we need it all as soon as possible."

  I sucked in a breath. And stopped the vid for a moment.

  "Jane, find me a bit of vid. Third original Matrix if I recall rightly. The machines break into Zion. I want the section where what comes through totally overwhelms the defense."

  "Found it."

  It popped up on a side screen. It was exactly what I wanted. I restarted the vid.

  "Let me start. I'm including a vid from a very old bit of entertainment. But it’s a perfect representation of one of our problems. The analogy is a water pipe, full and flowing rapidly, suddenly sliced open so the water flows out freely. How do we stop every last drop from coming out of the pipe?"

  "We can have a fleet at a jump point, and fire everything we have at what comes through, but watch this vid of it being done. The defense fails because of volume and diminishing returns as casualties mount. My question is, how can we handle this? And not just when it happens, but for as long as possible after. At the moment, I don’t believe we can. An enemy in sufficient numbers would quickly overwhelm our largest fleet. Think black across a system. Either the ships are huge, or the numbers are huge. Maybe both. How do we bottle up a jump point?"

  "I don’t have an answer for my question, but I have people thinking along these lines. Now is the time for technical and tactical genius to come among us. All thoughts are welcome. Sorry if I just ruined your day. Misery needs to be shared."

  I grinned at them, but there wasn’t any warmth in it, and they would know that.

  I had one last thought.

  "Murphy's Law tells us to expect the worst possible thing, at the worst possible time, in the worst possible way. We need to know what all of them might be, and have plans and tech in place to counter them. We don’t have much time. Hunter out."

  I sent it off, and pinged George to meet me on Gunbus.

  The thing I hadn't said was one of the corollaries. Even if you thought of all the possible ways things could go wrong, and countered them, something new would promptly happen. Murphy, whoever he was, must have been an excessively depressing person to have been around.

  Forty Four

  Another day, another ship launch.

  When I came onto the Bridge just before eight, George was already there, pumped and pacing. I had to laugh at the look he gave me. It could best be described as hungry.

  His new command slid out of the bay right on schedule, and Jane moved the ship near to Gunbus.

  "Holy hell," exclaimed George, while madly grinning.

  It was indeed a weird looking ship. Bob had taken the same long thin rectangle hull he'd used for Defiant, and once again he'd cut two Cruiser hulls down the long axis. But this time, he'd only used three of the halves. The top section was the top half of the most modern of the captured Cruiser hulls. To the right and left sides of the rectangle, he'd used the lower halves of the two Cruisers, giving the ship less guns than it could have had, but two large hanger decks. The lower side o
f the rectangle was completely flat.

  When George's eyes had stopped bugging out, Jane took us to one side of the new ship, flipped over sideways, and docked us 'up' into one of the hangers. We looked out over the enormous cavern, and saw five more docking positions for Corvette size ships, and twelve more fighter sized docks. All of them were setup for Dropships.

  George took in his fill, and he led me towards where the access shaft should be. We found one, but next to it was also a travel car. Beyond it were a dozen more. The door opened at our approach. We stepped into a space large enough for a combat team, or a half team in combat suits.

  "Where to?" said Jane, through coms.

  I nodded to George, giving him the option.

  "Bridge," he said.

  The car took off so fast we could feel the acceleration, even through the gravity compensation. After a few seconds, there was a definite gravity shift, which I assumed was us changing from moving across the ship to moving up. The car stopped, and we stepped out.

  The Bridge was similar to Annette's CCC, which in itself was similar to BigMother's Bridge. The difference here though, was the rear had seats for ten people, spaced to allow them to be occupied by people in full combat gear. There was an XO console and coms console in the standard position in front of the captain's chair, but behind it, and on each side of it lined up with the front consoles, was a third and fourth console. This put the captain's chair in the middle of the four consoles.

  George sat in the Captain's seat without me needing to invite him to. He immediately pulled up the ship's specs.

  Now the true nature of the ship became apparent.

  The flat underside had massive retractable landing struts. At intervals along it were retractable ramps big enough for the giant suits. The entire underside had been designed to put boots in the dirt as fast as possible. George pulled up the stats on accommodation and whistled. The ship could transport a full battalion, with all their equipment. In terms of our existing teams, two teams of fifty would make up a company, and the ship could carry ten companies.