Starfarer's Dream (Kinsella Universe Book 4)

by Gina Marie Wylie

  “I keep telling myself that, sir” the commander said as he popped the steel door.

  Captain Travers waved the tall daughter of Captain Wolf forward. “Look for documentation.” That turned out not to be particularly difficult, since there was a crate dead center of the container marked, “System Specs.”

  They pried that open and the young woman inserted one of the data disks into a reader. Bill tried to read over her shoulder, but evidently she was a faster reader than himself. In fact, he could hardly see any of the words, they went by so fast.

  She turned to them. “It says here the Fleet standard laser is the Lima Juliet mod 4 November. Four gigawatts.”

  “That’s correct,” the two Fleet officers chorused.

  “The Lima Juliet mod 7 Alpha is 1.2 terawatts. They go into rather great detail concerning the differences.”

  Captain Travers whistled. “A factor three hundred scale up!”

  The young woman was reading again, jumping now, around the disk. She looked at them. “You are contemplating installing these on this ship?”

  Bill looked embarrassed. “The thought had crossed my mind. I hate to be in the middle of a shooting war, without anything but my navigation and comm lasers.”

  “I’ll need specs on your ship. I’m not sure you can do it. These things suck up juice; I mean they really use it up.”

  “A terawatt laser probably does. The manifest says we have eight.”

  “One, maybe. Two? You have a better chance of being hit by lightning where you stand, sir. Captain, charging even one is going to have a significant impact on your fuel budget. I’ll need to see your numbers, but it’s not going to be pretty.”

  “Ugly I can deal with; I’d rather be armed and ugly than pretty defenseless.”

  The young woman smiled slightly. “Ugly is something I’ve lived with all my life.”

  Bill Travers reached out and put his hands on her shoulders, his eyes locked on hers. “Miss Wolf, Fleet captains are given wide latitude in emergencies. The day we bring one of these lasers on line, I’ll log your commission as a brevet ensign of the Fleet.” He grinned, “Your father told me you wanted to be Fleet. Surprise!”

  She looked at him, and after a second she grinned slightly. “Oh, yeah! You sure know how to get a girl’s attention, Captain!” She flipped the off the disk reader. “Three plus weeks, right?” Bill Travers nodded. “Maybe.” She motioned for one of the Marines to take the crate of documentation, and then headed for the door, “I need to look at some schematics.”

  The Marine trailed along, his face locked in a marine’s “I’m just doing what I’m told” expression on his face.

  II

  Two hours after the cargo modules had been opened, Jake and Willow Wolf met with Captain Travers.

  “We’re going to need every hand aboard ship for these changes,” Jake told his captain. “Sixteen, eighteen hours a day. You, Naomi, Hoyt and Captain Wolf will have to con the ship, eight hour ship watches, a watch lending a hand and some personal time. Everyone else goes to six hour watches. Me and mine will spend one on duty, two watches on ship mods, one personal. Everyone else, three shifts on ship’s work, one personal. First estimate is, with a little luck, when we come out at Tannenbaum, we’ll have one laser up and some first class hardware for guidance and tracking. You won’t be able to shoot more than five, six times without seeing the man about a dog.”

  “Any sooner?”

  The engineer laughed. “It won’t take much to make it later. Sooner is not a real possibility. The odds are that we’ll have the important things ready; others might not make the cut.”

  “Do what you can.”

  Four days later they exited High Fan, and then sixty-five minutes later jumped a light year at right angles to their prior course, before continuing on. Willow Wolf had asked, if there was no emergency, for an extra hour in normal space; nothing appeared on the screens and she got the time.

  Captain Travers called Jake in, afterwards. “How’s it going? The sensors and the laser?” He didn’t want to sound anxious, but the maneuvering they’d done during the pause had aroused his curiosity.

  Jake shook his head. “It’s the damndest thing I’ve ever seen! Sensors, fire control and that stuff, we still have another week or so getting rigged and then another couple of hours or so off fan to calibrate.

  “As for the laser, the Marines have started calling her the Laser Lady.” He sighed. “She does things, Bill... she does things.”

  “When will the laser be ready?” the captain asked.

  His engineer laughed. “It already is. Like I said, she does things.”

  “Ready to test?”

  The engineer shook his head and laughed bitterly again, “Nope! It’s already calibrated and tested; the whole nine yards. Never, ever, have I seen anything like it! Damned if I know why no one ever thought of these things first.”

  “Is it pointable?”

  The chief engineer grimaced. “Not perfectly, but better than I would have ever believed. You have about an 80 degree cone, forward, around the center line.”

  Bill raised an eyebrow. “And calibrated? How is that? And pointable?”

  “She took one of the standard lidar cradles. She made it larger; a cut and paste job with cutting torches there. She offset the weight and size differences with a little nip here, a little tuck there and swapped to some larger stepper motors.” There was a small sigh of admiration from the large engineer.

  “But calibration...” Bill whispered in awe. He’d calibrated weapons lasers a dozen times in his career. It took days!

  Jake nodded, reading his mind. “Calibration takes all that time because you adjust the mounts, so that the laser goes where it’s aimed. The Laser Lady did it backwards. When we were off fan, we launched a reflector. At a hundred kilometers, we started to track it with the big laser, all of the exciter stages off. That made it just like a big lidar. She worked out the offsets from where the computer thought the booger was pointed, to where it actually was. An hour, Bill, that’s all it took. We’ve been screwing that job up for three hundred years; she got it right. Who the hell cares where the booger is actually pointed? You calculate the offsets and let the computer worry about it after that.”

  “That’s awesome,” Bill Travers averred.

  “Yeah, but that’s just half. The damn thing is directable, even though we don’t have the fire control computer up yet. It takes a feed off the lidars, and then cranks it through the nav computer. It’s not a great bearing, but we’ll be able to hit anything within a light second. With the fire control computers, we’ll be able to improve that out to close to a light minute.

  Captain Travers looked at him, thoughtfully. “We still have another week...”

  “Forget it. Willow and her team are going to spend the time routing more conduit from the fans to the big guy, otherwise we’ll never get the booger charged. You don’t want to know what it’s going to cost to charge it, either. It’s a three percent solution, Bill. Three percent of our fuel per shot. Sixty-eight percent of the maximum reactor output for six minutes. There will be a twenty-four percent hit on the fan output as well. Three percent of the fuel and six blessed minutes to charge it.”

  The two men sat silently for a long minute, regarding each other, before Bill Travers spoke again, his voice even. “The bottom line is that the laser is ready now and fire control and the sensors will be ready before Tannenbaum?”

  “Aye, aye, Captain,” the engineer reported formally.

  III

  “We’re not going to mess with the nav point at Tannenbaum.” Captain Travers told the assembled crew of Starfarer’s Dream a few hours before they arrived at the next system on their list. “We go straight in.”

  Everyone nodded and Bill Travers continued, “We will have not only the navigation lidars, but as I’m sure you’ve all heard, a Fleet laser as well, plus some excellent fire control computers. There’s just the one laser, but there’s the little fact that th
at one laser can blow out a cruiser-sized vessel at three light seconds. That’s the good news -- the bad news is that we’ll be able to do it once. Recharge on the capacitors is going to be six minutes. Each and every time we fire the weapons laser, we use up nearly three percent of our fuel. That means that until we tank, we have five or six shots, and then we’re out of juice.

  “That said, I’ll tell you now: if we have to shoot at anything, Starfarer’s Dream will shoot at every target that we can shoot at. Right up until we’re bone dry or the other side scores. I have no reason to suspect that we will have to do that at Tannenbaum, but I want you all to know: if there is a battle, we’ll do what we must.”

  The Marine gunnery sergeant spoke first. “Ain’t any of us eager to get turned to space gas, Captain. Me and my lads -- some of us have families back home. But we’ve seen Agincourt and Gandalf. Whatever it takes, Captain, we’re with you and the Laser Lady.” He sketched a salute at Willow, who looked surprised.

  Captain Wolf spoke up. “Me and mine, we’re Rim Runners. You, Captain, you’re a Runner, too. There aren’t any real civilians running the Rim. We do what we have to do. We do it for our kids; we do it for other people’s kids. We always look to the future, careful of the lessons of the past. That’s what Runners do, Captain.” He looked at his wife, and then at his two daughters. “That’s what we’ll do. Whatever we have to.”

  Naomi spoke, not something she usually did at meetings like this. “I’m dirty-foot Earther. A Portie off the reservation.” She shrugged. “I’ll be standing next to Bill, doing what I can.”

  Shortly, they emerged eight light minutes from Tannenbaum’s star, just outside the fan well. Captain Travers had the ship’s best instrumentation pointed at the planet. Seconds after they emerged from High Fan he breathed a sigh of relief. “As of eight minutes ago, Tannenbaum was okay.” He continued to study the instruments. “Naomi, transmit the Paul Revere codes to the Fleet Base. Let’s move a little closer, but stay outside the fan limit. Slow and steady.”

  The first response was from the communications watch stander at the Fleet Base. The Paul Revere warning was obviously something not in his normal duties and after the repetition of the warning for the first few seconds he called the duty officer to listen and badly rattled that young officer as well.

  The duty officer had been reluctant to pass the warning up the chain of command, but the problem with bucking SOP is that if you make a mistake your career goes in the toilet. Make a mistake with this particular SOP and you could kill every last man, woman and child of the human race.

  It took another three minutes, but finally the duty officer told Bill, “I have notified Port Admiral Benjamin Emmanuel and Fleet Admiral Sergei Larimov. It is 2214 local time. Be aware that it might take a few minutes to get them on line.”

  “God,” Bill told the others on the bridge, “I hate to take a chance of getting caught inside the fan limit. We won’t stand a snowball’s chance if they come at us. So we can’t do this from this any closer, no matter what they think.” There were murmurs of agreement.

  A few minutes later a bleary-eyed man looked at them from a screen, his uniform tunic unbuttoned around his chest, a rear admiral’s twin stars on his collar. “Bill Travers! Is that you?”

  “Sergei, it is.” Bill stopped and laughed harshly. “I guess I should say, aye, aye, Admiral. Captain William Travers, reporting for duty, sir. I cancelled my retirement.”

  “Paul Revere?” the admiral asked. “What’s this?”

  Captain Travers briefly explained their mission, and then detailed what they’d found at Agincourt and again at Gandalf.

  “I have a little trouble believing this, even if it is coming from you, Captain Travers,” the aground admiral told him.

  Another man had joined the first admiral on screen, dressed in impeccable Port greens. “This is more than just a little hard to believe,” the new admiral concurred, curtly.

  “Admiral Larimov, we have a family aboard that we rescued at Agincourt. They saw what happened there. Gandalf was our first Paul Revere stop -- Admiral, it’s gone too. And it gets worse, sir. Not only aren’t they human, they can detect a ship on High Fan.”

  “I’d say not possible, but the boffins say it is. They just haven’t a clue how to do it.” Sergei Larimov made a come along gesture with his hand. “What else do you have?”

  “At Gandalf three of their ships jumped to the nav point, we’d been there for about two hours at that point. We detected no ships jumping so they had to have been further out. One of them looked like it was attempting to dock with something else. The nav point had been burned, really burned.

  “We jumped towards Gandalf itself; I thought the nav point had been defended. Now, I’m not so sure. I got a good look at Gandalf before we left. It was gone, just like Agincourt. They hit the planet with hundreds of bombs, really big bombs. And Admiral Larimov, the same two cruisers we’d seen at the nav point jumped to within a half light second of us, within a minute of when we came off fan.”

  “So you came straight here?” the Port admiral growled in anger.

  “You didn’t, did you?” the Fleet admiral asked.

  “No, we jumped for nowhere, stopped after a day and a half, took a jump at an angle towards Fleet World, and spent eight days on the dog-leg. Then we stopped another couple of hours before resuming here. We stopped a few other times, as well.”

  “And you say that your ship was carrying a Fleet manifest?” Admiral Larimov queried Bill.

  “Yes, sir, we were to open the base on Agincourt. We have food, spare parts and other logistical requirements for the base.” “Other logistical requirements” being a code for weapons materials.

  “Well, I think you and Commander Hoyt had better shuttle down here. I’m not sure at this point what to do -- at least a Board of Inquiry.”

  “Admiral Larimov, I don’t want to sound like I’m forgetting I’m just a captain and that you are an admiral, but you need to worry about what’s going to happen here if they come in and I have to complete my Paul Revere command set.”

  Admiral Larimov shook his head. “I will, but that’s not my primary concern just now. What you’ve done is questionable, Captain Travers. You and Commander Hoyt need to report at once, in person, to Tannenbaum Fleet Base.”

  Captain Wolf spoke for the first time. “Do you know Admiral Kurt Wolf, Admiral?”

  The admiral nodded; everyone in the Fleet knew or had heard of Admiral Kurt Wolf.

  “He is my father. When he hears of what you’ve done here, assuming any of us live, he will come here and vomit on your shoes.”

  Admiral Larimov paled at the emphasis on the last pronoun. The story about Admiral Wolf and the idiot bureaucrat was told every time someone in the Fleet talked about bone-headed dirty-feet. Not many, even in the Fleet, had the courage -- or the ability -- to do what Admiral Wolf had done. But he’d done it, and the mission had been accomplished on time. No one would ever forget how.

  Captain Wolf continued, his voice deadly brisk. “Agincourt and Gandalf are gone -- that’s more than a half billion human beings, Admiral. Since the Federation population is close to a hundred billion, that’s almost two-thirds of a percent of the human race, Admiral. You really can’t afford, Admiral, to waste even one second of the time you have available to protect the fraction you have under your care. I am certain, Admiral, that your dereliction of duty will be looked upon six hundred million times more gravely than Captain Travers if you err.”

  “Admiral,” Captain Travers spoke gravely, “we’ve been dumping our files on the secure channel -- surely you’ve seen the summaries?”

  It was the Port admiral who spoke next. “What you are saying is irrational, Captain. Why would anyone destroy an inhabited planet?” The Port admiral shook his head, clearly disbelieving them. “What would be the point?”

  “The point, you moronic cretin,” Naomi spoke up, “is that maybe they think of one of our planets like we think of a nest of ants! You po
ur boiling water on it to destroy the nest. Do you really care that they die? Do you really care that their eggs and young are destroyed in the process? So what if the ant hill is destroyed? It’s not as though we have any use for it!”

  “This is getting out of hand, Admiral Larimov,” Captain Travers said, trying to remain calm. “Admiral, sir, you have a threat. You can file a report on me as you will, but you have to do something against the threat and I have to obey my orders.”

  “Don’t you lecture me about my duty, Captain!” Admiral Larimov said angrily. “Don’t you dare!”

  Captain Travers reached down and put his finger on the cutoff. “We’ll get back to you in a few, Admiral, about when we’ll be down.” Then he cut the link. “Naomi, continue feeding the data dump down to the planet. Ensign Wolf, what’s in space?”

  “A number of civilian vessels; none close. A routine query of the data base aground shows that only two Fleet ships are in port -- a cruiser and a frigate. Both are only partially manned. The frigate is in orbit, but they are undergoing some heavy equipment maintenance where micro-gravity would be useful. Neither ship can get underway in the near term. Perhaps two or three days.”

  “It is my intention, then,” Captain Travers said firmly, “to continue the Paul Revere command set. In truth, Admiral Larimov does not have the authority to countermand those orders.”

  Commander Hoyt looked pale. Captain Travers considered recommending a spell in the tanning room.

  “We’ve been ordered to report,” Commander Hoyt replied, flustered, trying not to sound totally defeated.

  “You are free to comply, if you wish, Commander. Admiral Larimov was a First Classman when I was a Plebe. His brain was filled with regulations even then. I have no idea why the Fleet kept him; he’d have been ideal in Port. To my certain knowledge, he has never had an aloft command before this. There are more important things at stake here than Admiral Larimov’s regulations. So sorry, Dream is going on.”