Starfarer's Dream (Kinsella Universe Book 4)

by Gina Marie Wylie

  Commodore Shipley promptly weighed in. “Admiral, I have to agree with Commodore Cross -- what you are demanding is against all good practice and common sense. Sir, we could be attacked at any moment.”

  “There haven’t been any attacks for weeks,” Admiral Stepanowski reminded them, “and those attacks were small and mostly defeated. They are regrouping. The belief is that they will attack less well-defended systems first.”

  “The problem with that theory is that if you’re wrong, you kill a billion people,” Commodore Cross said angrily. “We can’t take that kind of a risk.”

  “I can and will. I tell you, it’s nothing.”

  “And I’m telling you that it is something. You will do this only over my written protest.”

  “And mine,” Commodore Shipley concurred.

  In for a penny, in for a pound, David thought. Tag Cross was right -- they were playing for a billion marbles and you can’t bet the pot without ever looking at your cards.

  “I agree with Commodores Cross and Shipley, Admiral. This is an unnecessary risk. I too will protest in writing.”

  “And I will log all of you for insubordination; speak further and I will consider it incitement of mutiny against properly constituted authority. Commodore Cross, get down to the planet and make those arrangements. Commander...” Admiral Stepanowski made the rank sound slimy, “You will do as I have commanded. Cancel any remaining exercises, recall the vessels outside the fan well and prepare to stand down.”

  The three men turned their backs on the admiral without another word, much less any military courtesy.

  David went to the bridge to pass on the order. In theory, of course, he had no business ordering Admiral Stepanowski’s flag captain to scratch her nose; in practicality it was just a matter of form. She knew where the orders she was getting came from.

  She was a tall woman, with very fine features and a marvelous olive skin. She was, she’d told him when he’d paid his respects, a native of “Old Egypt” and it was a matter of great pride in her family that she was in the Fleet and doing what she was doing.

  David had withheld judgment. Captain Said did whatever Admiral Stepanowski asked of her, with demur or, it seemed, a qualm.

  The rules on military etiquette were one thing; working together every day for weeks such things were relaxed to the point where an informal working relationship was in place. Still, the question on the bridge watchkeeping exam said it all -- assume for a moment that the responsibility for anything aboard Ramses was anything other than Captain Said’s responsibility, and she’d straighten you right out.

  Thus, when David presented himself to her, what he did was formal and out of character. He stood at attention and stiffly saluted her. She looked at him curiously. “Commander Zinder?”

  “Captain Said, Admiral Stepanowski has required me to terminate the remaining exercises and recall the three remaining exercise vessels. We are to stand down, and prepare to land on New Cairo for shore leave.”

  The woman David had never had much regard for looked at him, turning pale. “We’re to what? Stand down? That’s...”

  “Those are Admiral Stepanowski’s orders, Captain,” David said levelly.

  She stared at David, and then lifted her phone. “Admiral, Captain Said. Commander Zinder says we are to stand down, and prepare to land on New Cairo. How can that be?”

  There was a pause and David winced as the captain’s color turned a shade he never imagined a living person could have.

  “I will do no such thing! That is the most absurd order I’ve ever been given!”

  Another pause. “Then relieve me, you incompetent moron! I would rather be court-martialed by your order -- I can think of no finer endorsement!”

  Again a pause and she said quietly, “Admiral, please don’t do this. Do to me what you will, but there are a billion people on New Cairo. This... this means their certain doom. We know they watch us; this will certainly bring a response. Admiral, you can’t do this!”

  A moment later she folded her phone and stood still, her eyes closed, her nose flaring. Everyone on the bridge was staring. Captain Said hadn’t bothered with circumspection.

  She took a deep breath. “Commander Zinder, Admiral Stepanowski has relieved me for cause. He has called the executive officer to the bridge. Pending Commander Cordoba’s arrival, sir, the bridge is yours. Admiral Stepanowski tells me to remind you that you have your orders.”

  She turned and walked away, her back rigid.

  David spoke loudly then to the bridge crew. “You heard. We’re supposed to stand down, and then land for some shore leave. Admiral Stepanowski thinks that the risk of an attack here is negligible. We have the right of input; feel free to register your opinions with your department head. Commander Cordoba, when he arrives on the bridge, would be the logical person to present complaints to.

  “In the meantime, we have our duty. We mustn’t be distracted by side issues.”

  David took a deep breath and threw away what he thought might have been a promising career in the Fleet. “Communications, call the three exercise vessels and tell them the exercise is called off and to report to the New Cairo Fleet base, as soon as possible, where they will be eligible for shore leave. They may stand down from action stations as they wish.

  “Those of us here on the bridge will hold our positions until properly relived by day watch, and then we may stand down.”

  There were, David as sure, Fleet captains who couldn’t read between the lines. All three of the out-world cruisers confirmed their orders. People turned to their duties and to a casual observer all would have appeared normal, even if David could sense currents and riptides that didn’t bode well.

  His phone chime and he lifted it. “Zinder.”

  “Commander Zinder, this is Commander Laughlin, sensors. You need to bring up screen SD-99.”

  David walked over to the nearest blank spot on a wall and keyed the screen name. “I’ve got it.”

  “Commander, we just brought up our latest improvements to the detectors; we found this.”

  David felt a moment of nausea. The three human ships had gone to High Fan and now each of them was being trailed by eighteen other ships.

  He spoke loudly. “Sound General quarters, no drill! Man your battle stations!”

  He regarded the screen as there was a moment of frozen silence around him, before the alarm started to sound.

  The human ships were loafing along at eighty percent of max power; the aliens were coming on at ninety. Moreover, each group of aliens had exactly the same vector as the ship they were tailing. The human ships would drop from fans and would almost certainly be attacked at once.

  Except, that wasn’t going to be the case. He had no idea of what those three captains were going to do. Each had eight blues; each was outnumbered eighteen to one. The odds were that they would get to fire one laser broadside and that would be all.

  One of the human ships reacted, going to ninety-two percent of max power, while the others continued as they were. David grimaced. That captain had just told the aliens -- all of the aliens -- that humans could now detect them on High Fan. Bethany Booth said that they came in with one plan and stuck to it; that they were very slow to react.

  Feet pounded in the corridors. An angry voice penetrated his thoughts. “Zinder! I’ll see you shot for this! This is a patent attempt to...”

  “Fifty-four inbound alien ships,” David reported calmly. “They are trailing each of the three ships we had in the outer system. I’m pretty sure they were counting on surprise to destroy them before they could react.”

  He waved at the screen. “One of our captains has accelerated. There is no way to learn of his intentions; we’ll just have to wait and see what he does. His best plan would be to continue past New Cairo and hope they stay with him... in that case he’d have cut the number of attackers by a third.”

  “One minute until they reach the fan well,” a sensor officer reported.

  Davi
d saw Commodore Cross arrive and stare at the screen. Well, it was pretty clear, when you got right down to it.

  David spoke loudly. “Communications, was the alert passed to the other ships and the rest of the system?”

  “Roger that, Commander,” the communication department head reported.

  “What do you think, David?” Commodore Cross asked.

  “Well, if they follow those ships down close to the planet, it’s going to be exciting. Their best choice would be to fire counter ship until they were sure they’d killed us, and then switch to the planet. We will be able to beat that, handily. There are too many ship targets out here, and they will find that too many of them have blues.

  “Their next best option would be to...”

  “Aliens have dropped from High Fan!” an excited sensor officer reported. “They were just short of the fan well!”

  A few moments passed before the sensor officer spoke again. “They are launching missiles!”

  A moment later the voice hesitated. “Maybe those are fighters? They just went to High Fan again... they only launched two apiece!”

  David’s mind sifted through the possibilities for a second. His brain came up three lemons and he turned to the engineering liaison. “High acceleration warning! Ten seconds to one G! Then it will go to five gravities five seconds later! Engineering! Add to our current vector along the same line we’re taking! Five gravities.”

  Admiral Stepanowski was gibbering something and David saw Commodore Shipley simply slam his fist as hard as he could into the man’s stomach, doubling him over. He used both hands to slam against the admiral’s neck dropping him to the deck, unconscious.

  Like everyone else who’d been standing, David hustled to the nearest position and belted in. The acceleration was no worse that an aircraft taking off... and then it steadily got worse.

  “What?” Commodore Cross asked, his breathing labored.

  David spoke loudly. “Warn the Fleet -- the enemy has High Fan-capable homing missiles. Take immediate and drastic evasive action!”

  David wanted to cry. Because of the luck of the draw, Ramses was on the other side of the planet from the attack. The missiles, two of them, aimed at them had to go on a very roundabout course, outside the fan limit, drop from fans, accelerate to get the right vector and then go to High Fan again. They had almost five minutes to avoid the missiles.

  Other ships, not so lucky, were already gone.

  “They come off fan right on target and detonate a millisecond later,” Commodore Cross stated the obvious. “There’s no chance to react.”

  “Half of our ships have no chance to react against the missiles. They did the next best thing, many of them. There are now twenty fewer alien ships.”

  “And the ship that is attempting to flee?”

  “Borodino, Commodore. They were gaining on their pursuers, and now those pursuers have dropped from High Fan.”

  David gulped. Each of the eighteen ships chasing Borodino launched the tracking missiles at the human ship.

  David could only grimace. The captain of the Borodino had made his bed and was now stuck with it. Which had the greater range? The ship or the missiles? Logic said the ship, but there were going to be some serious overloads of the ship’s waste recycling systems until the matter was resolved.

  David grimaced when he saw the two alien missiles tracking Ramses adjust to the change in their vector. Three minutes left.

  “Engineering, reduce acceleration to zero, then a full six gravities on the reciprocal of our course!”

  There had to have been casualties aboard Ramses already. Five gravities after such a short warning! And then six gravities on the reciprocal? Anyone unconscious was going to be injured again, and perhaps severely.

  He shut it out of his mind. If there was one person left alive aboard Ramses at the end of the battle, it would be a major victory!

  The tactical screen showed what he was afraid of. The aliens, having cleared the defenders from one side of the planet were salvoing missiles at the planet. There was no way, with the planet’s bulk between them, that Ramses could intervene.

  More of the alien ships were gone, now nearly sixty percent, but more and more ships were falling prey to the homing missiles. Others, seeing Ramses’ maneuvers were also trying to avoid the missiles.

  Fleet captains are, David consoled himself, generally a very intelligent group of people. Some -- perhaps even most of those not destroyed already had a good chance.

  The navigation computation for the missiles’ tracks was complete. The closest was going to miss by ninety thousand kilometers, the second, by more than a hundred thousand kilometers. He grinned to himself. They’d lost New Cairo; like too many before him, he couldn’t bear to look at what the bombardment was doing to the planet.

  “We’re going to take a hit,” David announced. “Prepare yourselves for a sudden skew acceleration transient!”

  The first weapon detonated. Sensors had sensibly shut down everything a second beforehand and tried to shield their equipment.

  The wave front of the explosion reached them a third of a second after the detonation. It was all David could do to stay conscious. Then his eyes went to a glaring red warning light.

  All of it, he thought. All of it was for nothing. Most of them were dead. All of them, each and every last one of them was going to be as sick as a person could be and most would die. The weapon had dropped a hundred thousand rads onto the hull; the hull was good, it was indeed -- but it wasn’t that good. A half percent of that awful radiation storm had come through the hull. Five hundred rads of radiation -- right up there at LD 80. A lethal dose to eighty percent of the people exposed.

  “Crap!” Tag Cross said, looking at the same reading.

  David ordered the acceleration to cease -- the missile had exploded “ahead” of them on they course they were following, and they started to slow their rush towards the maelstrom of radioactive debris ahead of them.

  They had all but halted their movement towards the now-fading plasma cloud when the sensor officer screamed. “Missile acquired! Range is thirty thousand kilo...”

  A fraction of a second later the burst reached Ramses and Ramses added a tiny bit to the plasma cloud.

  * * *

  Roger Zinder looked up from his desk when he heard the peremptory knock on his door. His people knew not to bother him, and strangers weren’t supposed to get this far.

  He looked up and saw Dennis Booth. Words weren’t really needed, not really.

  “I’m sorry, Roger.”

  “What happened?”

  “We lost New Cairo and a billion people. One of them was David.”

  “Did he do any good?” Roger Zinder asked, his voice bitter.

  “It depends, I suppose, on how you measure good. He certainly made a huge difference in the outcome; but most people would think that losing the planet meant losing everything.”

  “I looked up New Cairo when I heard David was being posted there. How else to you describe the deaths of a billion people, except as a huge defeat?”

  “If David hadn’t have been there, the aliens would have a clean sweep -- the planet and all of the Fleet ships on station. As it is, nearly a third of our ships survived. Those ships, Roger, represent an enormous amount of firepower.”

  “Not enough to win the battle, however.”

  “Roger, I’m going to tell you something that you simply can’t speak about in public. The admiral in command at New Cairo was a fool and your son and two commodores spent most of their time trying to keep a grip on things.

  “I know you haven’t heard about what my daughter has been up too...”

  “You mean, besides grounding the Fleet and putting one of my engineers in a strait jacket?”

  “Besides that. She’s on Tannenbaum now, an operations officer, just as David was. Her admiral’s first task was, however, eliminating the two Fleet admirals in command there who tried to stop Starfarer’s Dream.”

  D
ennis Booth cleared his throat. “In spite of the obvious fact that there’s a war on, our people are still reluctant to remove a commanding officer for cause. No one did that on Tannenbaum, and that has resulted in some rather draconian punishments, although the admiral sent to resolve the matter took the death penalty off the table.

  “I don’t think that will ever happen again.

  “Command failures have happened, up until now, four times in the Fleet, since the war commenced. At Gandalf, when the captain of the Nihon refused to engage; at Tannenbaum when the Fleet admirals there attempted to prevent the passage of vessels on Paul Revere, on Grenada when an admiral refused to engage -- and now on New Cairo where the admiral in command simply went insane and ordered his ships to stand down, land and commence shore leave -- just hours before the attack that destroyed his planet and his ships commenced.

  “Your son, Roger, resisted that admiral with every fiber of his being -- but, as you know, he was handicapped by his age. The others who should have ostensibly helped him couldn’t make the transition from peace to war quickly enough. I can’t say such a thing will never happen again, but Fleet has passed down orders spelling out in crystal-clear detail how you go about supplanting a senior who refuses to do his duty.”

  “Fine, wonderful and good! You’ll make sure this defeat is less likely in the future. Going back to my original question -- did David do any good?”

  “If he had lived and saved the planet, they’d have given him the Federation Star. As it is, they gave him the Legion of Merit. In spite of some very brave deeds from some very brave people, Fleet has decreed that David Zinder is the only officer to receive an award for bravery, beyond the ‘Victory Medal’ for those who were there and survived.”

  “Did he kill any of them?”

  Dennis Booth looked uncomfortable. “Personally? No. Ramses never fired her weapons during the battle. Still, he correctly and accurately analyzed the battle as it unfolded, providing critical intelligence to the other ships, allowing many of them to survive the initial attack and to do serious damage our enemies.

  “Roger, he did his job as well as his job could be done. He didn’t kill any of our enemies; his ship didn’t kill any of them. But ships that heard his intelligence survived and many of them did kill our enemies; they forced the enemy from the field, in spite of a nasty surprise from a new enemy weapon. David countered it, Roger. He analyzed it, countered it, and spread the word.