by Jim Rudnick
"Yes, Sir—the battle of Quaxo—in the upper atmosphere when the Franauts attacked those Kinross floating cities. At least that's what we faced back on ITO. Seemed like the use of those mines in the atmosphere might work again. And yes, they did. I was a bit surprised that atmospherical adherence worked so well on ITO."
Tanner swallowed once and then again. The admiral knew that tactic well and had made sure all of the Kinross Navy captains knew about it too, even though it was a minor tactic this following of mines behind a powering body through the air.
The admiral sighed.
"Sit, Captain. First, I doubt if I were to ask why I was kept 'out' of the loop on this pseudo-mutiny that I'd get an answer that I would believe. Or think I needed. Or think it’s rational. You have let me down, Captain, I would have thought that you would have taken me into your confidence," McQueen said, his voice dry as he simply stared at Tanner. "So, you should know that this is not a dressing down or at least it should not be considered as such," he said again, dryly.
Tanner knew that the admiral was upset but he also knew that there were almost 500 hostages that he'd managed to help liberate.
"So a new mission, Captain. As you may not know—in fact I only learned of this a few months back—the RIM Confederacy is bordered by other inward systems and the Pentyaan Republic among others. To police that border, we use our own boundary buoys, and yes, once every twenty or so years, they all need to be serviced, replaced, or repaired. That's your task, Captain, to do just that to half the buoys."
The admiral almost smiled.
"Report to Operations down a floor and get the mission specs and load parts and buoys over at the dry dock stores. Dismissed, Captain ..."
Tanner said nothing. There was nothing to say, so he just nodded to his admiral….
Epilogue…
Leaving Navy Hall, Tanner went directly to his favorite local bar for a few more of those Randi ales.
And the knowledge that a set of boundary buoys needed no immediate attention.
"’Nother one?" the bartender said.
"Yup, maybe even a double," Tanner said … as the Scotch slid into his glass…
And maybe another one right after he thought as he hoisted the glass to his lips…
Prologue...for Book Two of the RIM Confederacy…due out in the fall of 2015…
At the very southern border of the RIM Confederacy the space ship Keshowse moved ahead and at its slow cruising speed, it could have been mistaken as a comet. It expelled no exhaust or plasma or anti-matter shower of protons, it simply coasted along at its maximum speed as it unhurriedly went by the boundary buoy and began to enter the RIM Confederacy.
It was of a shape and design that one could see would never ever touch-down on a planet – it was meant for interstellar movement only. Arrays hung off the front of the ship and pods that held unknown equipment jutted out all along some of the sides in haphazard random fashion.
There were none of the usual armament ports or arrays that one would normally see for plasma cannons or laser weapon barrels or energy pulse lenses. The bridge was plain to see, set back from the front of the huge craft as it jutted up and spread out on the forward decking, its rounded viewports facing ahead and abeam to port and starboard.
It was amidships that the strangeness of the ship was most apparent where there was a huge four-sided shell-like box that circled the ship's axis and ran for almost 1500 feet long populated with ports and lights that had no apparent purpose. Each of the four sides had ports strung in 6 rows all across the length of the box and each was bright from interior lighting.
And the whole ship was huge at more than a half a mile long; it was truly a colossal ship bigger than any other that had ever entered the RIM.
At its speed of slightly more than 30,000 miles per second it was certainly the slowest of intruders into RIM space as it flew too slow to make any kind of a beep on any ships display and that was a part of what was wanted by the ships builders.
Yet the RIM boundary buoy noted it passing, and as its automatic plotting algorithm mapped the course this RIM trespasser would take. At its current speed and heading, it would clear the RIM space with no collision worries in 240+ years, hardly worth worrying about, the AI stated, as it was simply a fast moving comet as its algorithm drew its own conclusions.
The AI then made that entry in its logs; it then transcribed the message to be sent to Juno and the RIM Navy network, and parked it in the buoys Ansible queue where it waited to be sent.
It would wait forever though as the Ansible arrays had been sheared off more than a month earlier during a rogue meteor shower that had come thru the RIM space and the few messages the buoy wanted to send, continued to be all stacked up and never sent.
So Juno never learned of the incoming alien ship that had just entered its space and the intruder's entry year passed and then another and another...the alien ship crawled into RIM space until now four years later, it neared Novertag, the planet in the system sitting almost on that southern boundary.
Find out more at www.jimrudnick.ca and sign up for notice of the launch date too!
