Starfarer's Dream (Kinsella Universe Book 4)

by Gina Marie Wylie

  The commodore nodded a second later. “I’m sorry about my distrust, Lieutenant. You see, I suspect you of ulterior motives in regards to Commander Wolf.”

  Johnny smiled. “Sir, I did avail myself of Commander Wolf’s public records after I was apprised of why she was late for the watchkeeping exam. My designs on Lieutenant Wolf are quite proper and aren’t ulterior, and given Commander Wolf’s history, I do believe that she can do as adequate of a job taking care of herself as she could do on the watchkeeping exam.”

  “Give it a rest, Bill,” the commodore’s executive officer told him.

  “Sorry,” the commodore said, abashed. He turned to Johnny. “Lieutenant, I apologize. In my defense, I plead ignorance of how to deal with a teenage daughter.”

  “Or any kind of daughter,” his wife growled and laughed. “We won’t talk about the sterling fashion that you manage relations with just about any woman.”

  “Lieutenant, in the way of an apology, I’ll let you hold Willow’s hand when she goes into surgery tomorrow.”

  “Sir?” Johnny almost yelped.

  “Aye, that altercation yesterday ruined some fine burn grafts on her wrists, done a few weeks ago on New Helgoland. It’s a good thing I wasn’t sitting on that Special Board or I’d have ordered the whole lot of them spaced!”

  Willow was blushing and Commodore Travers was about to say something else when the door burst open. A man of about forty-five, quite bald, came in and spoke rapidly. “Commodore, incoming message! All Fleet, Operational Immediate priority!”

  He waved his hand and one of the wall screens promptly lit up. A three-star admiral was speaking. “I repeat, all ships in the solar system! All departures are herewith deferred indefinitely. Any Fleet ship will put into the nearest base that can berth them and hold there until further notice! This is a Fleet Operational Immediate Priority! There will be no exemptions under any circumstances! Don’t waste our time asking!

  “All ship commanders, please standby for an Operational Immediate, eyes-only message in the Fleet Special Code.”

  The man repeated the message again.

  Naomi Travers whistled. “If I understand that correctly, they’ve just grounded the entire Fleet!”

  “Well, they didn’t tell us to stand down. I guess it’s too much to hope that the bad guys have given up,” Commodore Travers said. He glanced at Willow who’d turned pale as a ghost an instant after the commodore had spoken. “There’s no chance that the other possibility is true, Willow,” Commodore Travers hastily amended what he’d said.

  It took Johnny a second to figure out what the commodore meant. The human race might have surrendered? That was too terrible to contemplate!

  “All of you, please leave,” Commodore Travers told them. “The message is coming in now. I’ll let you know. No one is giving up.”

  They all left the commodore alone in the conference room. Shortly the captain called the Exec who passed the word to engineering and the ship's doctor to report to the bridge, and in moments the bridge was abuzz with conversation. In all of it’s history, the Fleet had never been grounded before. Individual vessels had, but not everything.

  Commander Tshombe called out loudly. “Navigation! We have tasks! Enough of this!”

  Johnny found himself calculating lifts every ten minutes for the next week where Warlock would depart Maunalua go system south for a light year, return to normal space, go a light year and a half towards the what navigator’s called “The Big Zero:” Zero hours, minutes, seconds, right ascension and the same for declination. Others were working on the other legs of the flight.

  It wasn’t exactly make-work but it was close to it. It was a calculation that took about three seconds to compute. They could, in fact, lift without the calculation, correct on the fly and do nearly as well as having done the calculation before lift. After all, first you go straight up for a few minutes, and then you worry about which way to head next.

  If there is anything faster than a ship on High Fan, it’s the speed rumors are generated and fly around the ship. When someone would tell him about the latest one, Johnny would just shake his head, content to wait for the official word. More than once he’d seen passengers on a liner go a little crazy when a rumor would appear. There is something about being in a relatively thin metal shell, light years from anything habitable that naturally sends a chill down your spine, even if you can’t imagine how far a light year is.

  First the Exec was called in, then a few other department heads, including Willow and Commander Tshombe. It was interesting to see which department heads went first and which went last. Why was the doctor and the engineering department head first and sensors seen last while navigation, communications were among the first? One of the most popular rumors was that the aliens had switched to bio-war and that there was a plague abroad in the Federation.

  * * *

  It was all clear, Johnny realized later, when you knew the real facts. When you realized that they taught how to detect ships on High Fan in elementary school -- not noticing it though -- it was enough to leave you a little dizzy. He had no idea how he’d have handled it if he was a propulsion engineer or sensor officer. Badly, he expected.

  Finally the commodore spoke to the crew. “You’ve all heard the news. The Federation pooched fan detection. In fairness, the Goddess of Benko-Chang, Stephanie Kinsella, was the first one to do so, but it includes everyone after her, including those of us not in propulsion or sensors, but who have watchkeeping certificates in either of those fields.

  “Aboard my previous ship, Starfarer’s Dream, Commander Wolf showed us the proper way to align lasers, something else that we’d pooched since the beginning as well. It behooves all of us to start turning over rocks -- not to mention some new leaves -- looking over ‘common wisdom’ to see if there are other, better ways, to do things.

  “This is just one of those things; it’s a tragedy and the war would undoubtedly been completely different if we’d realized it earlier, but you don’t get do-overs in wartime. We play the cards we’re dealt and we will carry this lesson forward, seared into our psyches.

  “There is some good news amidst this. We will be aground for about two or three days additional for installation of the new detectors and then we will lift for Grissom, where we will be painted with a radar-absorbing coat. In addition, Operations has increased the flotilla to eight cruisers -- and my personal favorite piece of news -- promoted me to rear admiral a little ahead of when I expected.

  “Thus, in four days we will depart for our patrol area. We will make sure Warlock is in all respects ready before then and that there will be no further delays.

  “One final word. We will be posting the relevant information about the new detectors. You have to understand that at this time they are about two hours old -- odds are, with more thought we can do a lot better than two light minutes when we put our minds to it. All ships are tasked with making improvements and reporting those improvements to Vice Admiral David, Deputy of Operations for Science.”

  * * *

  Three days later they lifted for Grissom Station and a new paint job. Johnny wasn’t sure if he was the only one who sent Admiral Travers a message reminding him that the coating would be lost the first time they landed on a planet with an atmosphere, but he did. He received a thank you but that was all.

  Usually to reach a patrol area you traveled a few months, unless your ship was posted closer. In this case their first destination was less than nine light years away from Earth, and even cruising at 390 times the speed of light at eighty-eight percent of max power meant the trip was less than eight and a half days.

  They were ostensibly headed for Tau Ceti, now known as New Home, the first interstellar colony, first surveyed by the Israelis, and subsequently settled by a mixture of Americans, Europeans and Japanese. Tau Ceti had a rather high iron abundance as well as other heavy metals, and while it was livable, those who lived there needed to be careful of their diet. The biosphere there turned o
ut to be half again as old as Earth's, with the biosphere having been reset frequently by an asteroid belt ten times the count of Earth’s.

  So, while New Home wasn’t actually that nice a place, there were more than fifty large habitats in the system and it was home to more ten percent of the industrial capacity of the Federation.

  On that course they would pass less than a light year from BL Ceti and it’s companion, their first targets, and they would take a jog in their course a half day after they passed the closet point to their actual target.

  The purpose of the Picket Force was conceptually simple -- even if it was just going to be difficult to implement much beyond a dozen light years from Earth. The vast majority of stars in the galaxy were M-class dwarfs that never had the gravity needed to attract and keep a large debris disk, and those with such small debris disks never properly developed large planets. But, even the smallest brown dwarf had debris in orbit around the star, and thus could be used by an enemy as a base.

  They were going to plant outposts in orbit around every star within twenty light years of the Earth. It was thought that the effort might take as long as two years and involve more than two thousand people on more than a hundred outposts. Since the number of stars went up with the cube of the distance from Earth, it didn’t bear thinking about what would be required to picket every uninhabited system in the Federation -- that was nearly a hundred and fifty thousand stars and would require three million people on outposts. Just supporting those outposts would require thousands of ships that the Fleet just didn’t have and weren’t likely to have for a generation or more.

  Further, there hadn’t been a rush of volunteers for the duty. You were out there, basically alone and unsupported, and if the aliens came your chance of survival was essentially nil. As a result about a tenth of those they had along to man the first three outposts were involuntary enlistees. The Federation had every intention of making what they told people about the punishment for improper behavior explicitly clear -- involuntary enlistment wasn’t something you wanted to look forward to.

  Approach to these systems was going to be tentative. A first ship would pass through the system on High Fan, and drop for three seconds about seven light minutes from the star and drop a sensor sat. These satellites had been specially prepared just for their mission. Normally sensor sats came in two flavors -- active and passive. Active sensors being those that used lidar to detect ships and objects, and passive being those that detected ships not on High Fan on gravity wave detectors. For tactical reasons, almost from the beginning the types of satellites were built based on their function, thus a passive satellite had no active sensors, while an active satellite had no passive sensors.

  Further, humanity used what was called “latch frame” for faster than light communications. In the third decade of the 21st Century a means was found to synchronize quantum states far removed from each other, so that a change in one was reflected in the other. Latch frame piggy-backed on electromagnetic radiation -- radio or lasers -- and so latch frame repeaters were placed throughout space to coordinate faster than light communication within the inner system. Because latch frame required a minimal signal strength to be transmitted and received, it was limited in range, but that range, in the solar system, extended out to the orbit of Saturn.

  Picket Force sensor sats combined all three functions. There had been arguments about whether or not they should cause the waste a couple of enemy missiles instead of one, but the sensor sats were limited to light speed without latch frame, which made them not very functional if the latch frame satellite was destroyed. So, all of the functions were placed in one satellite.

  Because the Federation was quite thorough, the crews of Picket Force outposts weren’t just going to sit around playing gin rummy, waiting to be annihilated if the aliens dropped in.

  The outposts contained a standard asteroid mining module. Using that, one could park the outpost near an asteroid (humanity had early on learned not to park them on an asteroid, not if they wanted any mobility) and supervise the operations as the mining module bootstrapped itself into a full-fledged asteroid factory, capable of making anything. That would take a month. After that they would start making additional sensor sats, old style, although the passive satellites could also detect ships on High Fan.

  The first ship had run faster than the rest of the flotilla, at ninety percent of max power, arriving six hours earlier than the other ships. After the sensor sat was dropped, the satellite would start broadcasting latch frame signals, known to be targeted by the aliens.

  Instead of the whole flotilla arriving at once, another ship dropped six hours later within a light hour of the sensor sat to see what was there was to see.

  All of the time they’d have their own detectors up and running trying to detect any ships on High Fan. Of course, the problem with that was that the detectors had a pitiful range and the other side would almost certainly see them coming first.

  Johnny was quite certain that some of the frequent meetings between Admiral Travers and Willow concerned how they were going to deal with contact with the aliens; it wasn’t Johnny’s area and he knew his intrusion into an area he had no knowledge of would be the equivalent of the welcome a whiskey salesman would receive at a temperance meeting.

  But, nothing happened, nothing was detected and two ships, one of them Warlock, went to plant the outpost. The outpost was commanded by Fleet reserve lieutenant who’d been a process engineer on a mining habitat before the war. He saluted Admiral Travers and turned to go.

  Johnny wasn’t sure why he was present for this, but Admiral Travers had requested his presence.

  One of those present, one that Johnny hadn’t paid any attention to, was the Marine captain. “One moment,” the captain said as the outpost crew headed for the hatch.

  He walked forward, stopping in front of a very young-looking member of the outpost crew. “Do you know who I am?”

  “A fucking Marine!”

  The captain laughed at the young man. “Aye, that’s another skill Marines have mastered very well! Young man, my cousin is Cecil Howe, a gunnery sergeant. Do you remember him?”

  The young man paled.

  Johnny felt a small stir in the room and saw that Willow Wolf was standing there, a Marine flanking her on either side, both men armed with sidearms, their weapons drawn. The young man growled something under his breath.

  Captain Hollerith was remorseless. “This is Fleet Commander Willow Wolf, the woman you assaulted a few days ago. At the time she had been in four battles, killed four alien ships and had been nominated twice for the Federation Star -- but then she was only a lieutenant. Now she is a full commander. Tell me, sir, have you learned anything?”

  “Bitch!” he said, making a rude gesture at Willow.

  Johnny contemplated taking a few steps and mashing the young man’s face into jelly.

  “I hope you pay attention more carefully in the future,” the captain told the young man. “You disparaged Commander Wolf within earshot of my cousin and he wanted to shoot you on the spot. I am, lucky you, more even-tempered.

  “Instead, I will offer you one last lesson to take to heart. Guessing casualties in this war is just that: guess work. Still, the best guess the Fleet has is that we’ll lose about one percent of the Picket Force outposts. You should be aware, young man, that on the Rim, the normal loss rate of teaching people to function in space is ten percent.

  “I would suggest that you pay much more attention to your lessons in the future and be very diligent in your studies.” The captain waved the party forward and the ten people boarding the shuttle over to the outpost filed into it. A moment later the shuttle broke dock and rode its two fans towards the rock that had been selected for them.

  Warlock pulled a little away from the miniature habitat and a few seconds later went to High Fan.

  The next day, Johnny braced the captain in the gym. “Captain, why did you expose Commander Wolf to that?”

  The c
aptain looked at Johnny and grinned. “My cousin was sure that the young man should have been shot. I owed him a favor and so I tried to get the bastard to go for Willow. Alas, he has learned the tiniest bit of native caution.”

  “That was despicable. Both in regards to Commander Wolf and that sorry asshole.”

  “It was that, Lieutenant. But, sir, his outpost commander reported him as dissatisfied and uncooperative and requested his relief. Except that fellow is the subject of a named draft to his post -- and only the originating officer or one higher in the chain of command can countermand the draft. I don’t think either Admiral Fletcher or Admiral Nagoya are going to do that -- Admiral Saito was the officer who requested the draft. There is nothing that can be done about the draft, in other words.

  “That young man doesn’t know it, but the outpost commander is considered a commander -- he has the power of life and death over his crew to protect his mission. Admiral Travers and I agreed that nothing else was going to get through to the fellow except a direct threat to his life.

  “The instant they cut loose from Warlock, the base commander became the responsible person and his mission is of such importance that he can terminate any threat to his mission.”

  “Oh,” Johnny said. “I’m out of my league, Captain.”

  “Lieutenant, we all are, when it comes to the Laser Lady. One day, you watch, she’ll have Nagoya’s job, but not before she’s held Ito Saito’s and then Ernie Fletcher’s.”

  * * *

  The next system was as uneventful as the first. They bid the outpost crew farewell however, with considerably less drama. After the second system quite a few of the crew were talking about the deployment being a milk run, that evidently the concerns about enemy bases near human-held systems were overblown.

  Johnny wasn’t so sure, and he studied all of the data on the Epsilon Eridani system. Initially humanity had high hopes for it, because from early on they’d known it had at least one planet and the dust disk was a hundred times denser than that around the sun. Still, no one had predicted what they found.