by Ron Collins
That much was clear.
Casmir, Gregor Anderson, and Katriana Martinez sat around the small table and discussed their options.
Deidra was here, too, because Martinez had been with her when she was summoned, and decided to bring her along. When she first came into the room, Casmir had wanted to send her away. She was his little girl. She was too young. But she had to do this sometime, and she was learning fast. Maybe too fast. But observing how issues got resolved was good for her even if it made him feel like he was in freefall. She sat in a chair at the edge of the table, quietly taking the conversation in, logging everything that happened as well as any recording device ever developed.
Gregor radiated the same fatigue he had shown in their caucus with the expedition planning group. The last few months had taken a lot from him. His face was drawn and darkened now, lines marked his face, and rings had grown under his eyes. Casmir wondered if his friend was sleeping well enough. Gregor sat forward now with his shoulders rounded, his elbows on his knees, and his wrists angled against the edge of the table. Sometimes he made his hands into fists and sat his chin on them, other times he just sat back to think.
Martinez answered questions, but otherwise spent her time absorbing the situation. It was like she was calculating, deciding what to think. Casmir had looked up her records, such as they were. She had been with U3 for a long time, but working under deep cover for long enough that he wasn’t sure how to help her, yet. But he liked her. He wanted to know more about what drove her.
“We can’t figure out how to help if we don’t know what happened,” Gregor said.
Martinez nodded, but seemed uncomfortable in the room.
“We don’t even know if she’s a spacecraft anymore, better yet if she’s ours,” Gregor added.
Casmir agreed. “With luck it’s just something broken. She’s new, after all. But it smells very bad.”
“We can’t make the mistake of underestimating the Uglies.”
A touch of surprised delight colored Deidra’s face at Gregor’s use of the term.
“I think we both know what we need to do, right, Gregor?” Casmir said.
His friend twisted his hands together, wrists resting on the edge of the table. Gregor looked at Martinez with a question embedded in his expression. “We need to jump Icarus into the area and see what’s really happening.”
It was a decision Casmir didn’t want to make, but it was the right decision.
If this was truly a worst-case situation, they had to get out of Eta Cass anyway.
“Can we do that?” He looked at Martinez.
“We’ve got the coordinates and we can load the jump plan from Einstein pretty simply,” she said. “Maybe it would be better to stand off a ways, though. Jump Icarus nearby and see if we can establish contact to find out what happened rather than hit the same place and run into an ambush.”
“I like that.”
“The ship’s programming contains a few preplanned maneuvers that could be toggled based on what things are like when we get there, though maybe you should get a tactical engineer to review them first, just to be sure they’re right. It’s the UG we’re talking about.”
“How do you know this?” Gregor asked, his voice carrying a tone Casmir recognized as wary. Gregor was worried about her, he saw. His hands had stopped fidgeting, and he leaned back in his chair in a way that assumed a position of power.
“Security in the UG can get anything they want,” Martinez replied.
A question grew on Gregor’s face.
“Because that’s how the UG is,” Martinez added.
“All right,” Casmir said. “That is the direction we go. Navigation will load coordinates near Einstein’s presumed position. We dip a toe into the water, and jump immediately away if we need to. One step at a time.”
“When can we be ready?” Gregor asked Martinez.
“If we start now, maybe 2400.”
“Then we start now,” Casmir said. “Tell me what you need and who you need. I’ll have dinner brought to where you are. Whatever you need. Just make it happen.”
Martinez nodded, her lips closed tight. Her response, when it came, was almost a whisper. “I can do that, sir. Thank you.”
She got up and left the room, Deidra following.
The door slid shut behind them, leaving Casmir and his friend alone together.
“Strange how time changes things,” Gregor finally said.
“How so?”
Gregor gave a halfhearted shrug, and he tapped the table with the fingers of one hand. “Weeks ago the ability to work with even a single Star Drive spacecraft would have felt like the world was open beyond our ability to imagine, but after only a short few days of having two craft at our disposal, sending Icarus into harm’s way feels like we are stepping onto a tightrope.”
“I hadn’t thought of it that way,” Casmir said. He smiled then, thinking about how far they had come. “Enjoy it while we can, eh?”
“Yes,” Gregor replied, standing. “Enjoy it while we can.”
CHAPTER 25
U3 Ship Icarus
Post Eta Cassiopeia Arrival: Standard Day 8 (ECA 8)
Local Ship Time: 2330 Hours
Now they knew.
The jump to Einstein was flawless. Contact had come immediately.
Einstein’s advanced firepower had staved off an attack, but the ship was partially damaged and probably not ready to jump back to Eta Cass for at least a week. In the meantime, they had taken a risk and used their standard impulse drives to dive into the deepest fields of the asteroid belt, thereby avoiding further immediate attack.
The hull breach from the attack transport was the worst of the damage, but it had been contained and could be repaired. They had lost thirty people in the battle, killed sixteen UG rangers, and taken four prisoners. Sensors that controlled the port-side boosters had to be replaced before they could jump safely, and several lesser subsystems needed to be restored. All in all, it wasn’t the worst news possible.
Einstein should be jump-worthy in short order.
Icarus jumped to and from her sister ship eight times over the next three days, shuttling key personnel and materials back and forth, but always keeping their stays in the Solar System brief in order to prevent UG forces from finding her.
Einstein’s laser defense rings were repaired first, her hull breach second.
Interestingly, the UG’s presence in the area was minimal—two sightings of small craft.
“That makes sense,” Martinez explained at one of her routine briefs of the leadership team. “The UG is cautious at heart. They’ve only got Orion left to them, and with only one Excelsior class ship, I don’t think they’ll risk her to the asteroid field. Especially not as a jump target. I mean, there is a lot of vacuum in the asteroid belt, but it’s tricky to get a jump just right and if you wind up in the same place as other solid material, well, let’s just say I don’t want to be there when that happens.”
Deidra had told Casmir that the woman had been spending all of her time doing deeper learning about navigation of the ships, and that edge showed in her conversation. “We all know there’s a lot of space in the field, but the Star Drive nav programs are nowhere near as perfect as the UG wants you to believe. They won’t risk losing Orion to a bad bit someplace, so if they want to go get Einstein, they’ll have to do it with conventional equipment.”
When it became obvious that the process was best left alone, Casmir and the rest of the leadership team left Captain Keyes of their own ship and the Einstein crew to complete their repairs, and they returned once again to the discussion of how best to run planetfall on Atropos.
At least, that was what Casmir Francis wanted to do.
CHAPTER 26
U3 Ship Icarus
Post Eta Cassiopeia Arrival: Standard Day 15 (ECA 15)
Local Ship Time: 0900 Hours
“We can’t let this stand,” Matt Anderson said. His face was now blotchy with the color of argum
ent. He was standing, but leaning with all his weight on both hands against the tabletop.
The discussion had started as a simple update session where each of the Atropos coordination groups were giving briefs on actions they had completed. The initial landing teams had finished their surveying. Construction equipment had been dropped and tested. Shelter was being put in place and the area was in process of being secured. The teams had found primitive wildlife, forms of reptile and mammal, and insects—several strange forms of insects, some considerably more aggressive than those on Earth.
Theoretically, Einstein would be back in the Eta Cass system in a few days, and the work would then progress even faster.
They were close to having full boots on the ground, and the conversation was moving on to how to best use Icarus and Einstein as platforms for both education and expansion.
Anderson, however, was carrying a banner for one of the more active groups within the Universe Three community—and right now he was carrying it with a great deal of fervor.
Kazima Yamada responded. “We don’t have the ships or the people to fight an all-out war with the United Government. We’ve barely been able to salvage Einstein.”
“Have you heard what the people in the decks are saying?” Anderson said. “We lost lives to that attack. They want justice.”
“No,” she snapped. “They want payback.”
“Same thing.”
Yvonne, who had been coordinating the conversation until the young Anderson stepped in, spoke up. “Justice and retaliation are not the same thing.”
Casmir coughed, using his illness to bring everything to a halt for a moment. The ability to bring proceedings to such a halt was, perhaps, the only real benefit to being sick that there was. He was not above taking that advantage when he needed to.
Heads turned his way.
He raised a hand as he finished, then wiped his lips with a napkin.
“Dr. Iwal has told me I should relax for a bit. I’m sure everyone has either heard that or guessed it, so I’ll tell you it’s true. I need to rest. Vonny here has been on my butt to slow down for the past several days.”
He smiled at her. She gave him a raised-eyebrow stink-eye, and the room got lighter.
“Of course, she’s been too busy working with each of you to get us onto the ground to do more than wag her finger at me, so I’ve been able to ignore her pretty well.”
More laughter came.
He stood up, breathed deeply, and gave another cough.
“I am tired, but I’m not ready to rest, because we are so close to the end game. You can taste it, right? We are almost to that moment when we can take a big breath of truly free air on our own planet.”
He came to stand beside Matt Anderson, who stood straight now, anchored to the floor in a defensive posture. Casmir put a hand on Anderson’s shoulder.
“Did we start this, Matt?”
“The UG started it by creating the wormhole drives.”
“That’s not a wrong answer,” Casmir said, “but it’s not correct, either. We are Universe Three. We take responsibility for ourselves. We have this conflict now because we are standing tall. So it is fair to say we started it in that way. That’s what the Uglies would say, anyway. And they aren’t wrong. We believe things should be different. So we should never forget that we did our part to start this.”
“Then we should finish it, sir,” the younger Anderson said.
“Yes,” Casmir said as he walked to the cabinet at the back of the room where coffee and tea dispensers sat. He pushed the commands for coffee and cream, and a hint of cinnamon added, then he turned and sat back against the counter while the dispenser operated. “We started this, so we need to bring it to an end. Of course we do.”
“We can’t win a war against the UG,” Yamada said.
“Of course we can’t.”
“Then how—”
“The goal today,” Casmir said, “is to get every member of U3 safely to Atropos without the UG being able to trace us. We should remember that—” Matt Anderson began to speak, but Casmir cut him off. “—there’s more to it than that. We need both a new star system for us, and a pipeline back to the Solar System to bring in more people who want to live in a truly open system. That’s the goal. Both a new home, and a paved road for others to get here. And so my good friend’s son is wrong in his view that we did not start this, and right in his view that we need to be able to deal with the UG. We’ve been ignoring that here, and that’s my fault.”
“Miranda Station.”
All eyes turned to Deego Larsi. The logistics planner, as was his wont, stood at a platform in the corner, an empty coffee cup on the stand before him. Larsi was a short man, maybe thirty-five, with a perpetual four-day stubble that he cultivated meticulously. He kept himself in shape. Casmir had listened to Yvonne complain about his penchant for being a smart-ass often enough, but he was also known for getting stuff done. Larsi understood how complex systems worked.
The dispenser finished with Casmir’s coffee, filling the area with a spiced-warm scent, but he let it sit.
“What about Miranda Station?” Casmir asked.
“I think you’re saying that once we get Einstein back, we need to hit two rocks with one skimmer, so to speak. That we need to take an aggressive act against the Uglies that will also serve to help us continue rescuing the rest of our people from the Solar System.”
“Exactly.”
Larsi motioned with his hand. “Miranda Station.”
“I get it,” Yvonne said. “Miranda Station has the flight academy, of course, but it’s also a UG hub for the manufacture and service of skimmers, bombers, and other military spacecraft—specifically including Orion and any other Star Drive system the UG’s ever made.”
“Give the woman a prize,” Larsi said.
“Yes,” Casmir said, now understanding completely. “We’ve got people who say Miranda is most likely building at least one more Star Drive, too.”
Yamada spoke. “Deego, you’re suggesting we strike Miranda?”
“I’m saying that all they’ve got is Orion, which they probably won’t get too risky with. At least not right away. And I’m saying that, as a guy who gets logistics, if—in retaliation for UG’s attacking Einstein—you take out Miranda Station’s manufacturing and service capability, then you also just happen to remove their ability to add to their Star Drive arsenal for a very long time—which then gives you something close to a free pass to pave that pipeline.”
“I see,” Yamada said.
Matt Anderson didn’t look happy, but the rest of the group quickly reached consensus.
“I think it’s a good plan,” Casmir said, feeling that sense of power that happens when a group comes to the obvious answer.
All around him, excited conversation broke out.
CHAPTER 27
U3 Ship Icarus
Post Eta Cassiopeia Arrival: Standard Day 22 (ECA 22)
Local Ship Time: 1015 Hours
It took two days after Einstein returned to shuttle all nonessential U3 members from Icarus to Einstein—or to the surface. As the final shuttle prepared to depart, Icarus would retain the navigation and engineering crew, twenty staffers to handle weapons systems, and fifty people to pilot the Z-pad skimmers that would make up the attack force.
Miranda Station, named for its position in orbit around Uranus alongside Miranda, the smallest of the planet’s five major moons, was so far away from the core of Solar System civilizations that the Icarus team could rely on a general sparsity of defensive systems merely because the station was considered nearly impossible to attack.
Until now.
Casmir ran his hands down his uniform. He usually played it informally, but today he felt the need to be crisp in his approach, so he donned the blue jacket with its red and gold patches and flaring.
“Let me go with you, Father,” Deidra said, her face red with anger.
Now that she understood she had a place in the order
of things, Deidra wanted to be part of everything. She was upset that she wasn’t allowed to be there while retaliation planning happened, and now she was convinced she was going on the raid with the Miranda Station team.
“No, Deidra. There is no place for you on this mission.”
“Mother?”
“You heard your father.”
Deidra screwed her lips over to the side.
“You assigned me to learn navigation. How am I supposed to do that if I don’t watch the navigators?”
“You learn like everyone else—watch when they run test trials, pass your simulation exams, and then your own trials.”
A knock came to the door. It was an escort.
“We’re ready, sir.”
It was time for Casmir to go to the bridge.
The escort would take Deidra and Yvonne to the last shuttle out, but as the leader of Universe Three, Casmir would be on the bridge when they made their attack run
He kissed Yvonne.
“Be careful,” she said.
The pressure of her hand on his hip told him more than the tone of her voice. Yvonne was as excited about a life on Atropos as Casmir was. And, now, so close to the target of a potentially quiet life, she was more concerned than the part she was playing allowed.
“I will.”
He turned to hug Deidra, but she was gone.
Twenty-seven moons plus the detritus from constant collisions of those moons meant their arrival at the jump target had to be perfect.
Perhaps it was luck, but the plan unfolded even better than Casmir could have hoped for.
With Martinez’s modifications, Icarus made the close-in jump to Miranda Station exactly as diagrammed. The station was caught by surprise, and Orion was nowhere around to supplement its meager defense.
Three waves of Z-pad squadrons hit in perfectly timed maneuvers.
The first wave of the attack destroyed what rudimentary defenses the station did have. The second focused on the manufacturing lines, wreaking even more devastation on the chief areas responsible for cranking out XB-25 Firebrands. The third wave focused on the design center and test facilities at the engineering school.
