The two officers shook hands, which Jan Kemp thought was a surprise. A further surprise was the young woman saying, “When I’m Admiral of the Fleet, after Willow Wolf and Cindy Rhodes have had their turns, it might come in handy.”
Chapter 10 -- Meeting of the Minds
Yolanda Ruiz grinned at her companion as her phone sounded. “Busted!” she said and the other laughed.
Yolanda looked at the text message on the screen and froze her emotions. It was a message from her mother saying, “Pick up a pizza on the way home.” Humdrum, inconsequential. Thousands of identical messages like that were sent every day.
Except for Yolanda, it had a special meaning. “I’m in a sticky wicket. I’ll call back in thirty minutes, or you need to flee.”
Yolanda smiled at Jaime Carruthers, even as Yolanda called a cab. “Sorry, Mom is on the warpath!” she told her friend.
“Your mother is sweet,” Jaime said with a laugh.
It was, Yolanda thought, past time for her mother to run a drill. She’d get home, get set and she’d get the stand down. No sweat! She’d get an “atta girl” from her mother and life would go on.
She trusted her mother. When her mother had explained that she was a deep cover agent, Yolanda had listened in rapt fascination. She couldn’t imagine someone working against the Federation, but her mother had led her to an online library and Yolanda had checked out some books about the history of her people. It was sobering to find that she, herself, as well as her mother and who knew how many others, had been sentenced to death in absentia.
Her mother had explained to Yolanda the abnormalities and exceptions about Yolanda’s age. Yolanda aged faster than most kids and matured much faster. When she was two, she looked like she was six. When she was four her mother had explained things to her, but Yolanda looked like a ten-year-old.
Now her growth and age were coming together; she looked eighteen, but was nearly fifteen. If she’d answered questions on tests honestly, she’d be a college graduate. Her task, once it had been explained to her was nothing like most secret agents. She was a college student tasked with taking leading-edge tech classes and remembering everything she learned. She had a prodigious memory and it was an easy task.
When she graduated, she’d get an internship at an off-world habitat where she’d spend a year teaching the new science to others. Those others would go home and teach even more people. Yolanda didn’t know which habitat she’d go to next year, and had absolutely no idea where “home” was and she would probably never know where it was.
Like her mother before her, Yolanda would return to Earth and spend the rest of her life in a technical field, with occasional “sabbaticals” to the habitat.
Here and now she slid her debit card into the cab and then went inside their house. She dropped her keys on the hall table and went quickly to the steps to the basement. A little later she settled into a chair that looked very much like an acceleration chair.
She flipped a switch that allowed water from the hot water storage tank to flow back into the coils on the roof. Oops! A valve glitch! Of course, if anyone was looking at the house in infrared they could no longer see inside.
Yolanda watched the digital clock on the main board. She had six minutes before the stand down was due. She watched the clock intently and when it was time, she swallowed once and made a radio call. “Shuttle Mad Hatter to Central Control, pilot Yolanda Ruiz, 8557-4414-1500. Requesting a clearance for Luna, Mare Crisium and Luna City.”
“Roger that, we are downloading the orbit now.”
One nice thing about an Advanced Pilot Certificate, traffic control expected that there was some reason why you wanted to go someplace now, and not wait. Thus there were no questions about why she wanted to launch now and not wait until the moon was in a better location.
She punched the launch code into the computer. Goodbye house where I grew up! Goodbye Mom, who said she’d either send the stand down or be dead!
The house had been cleverly designed; she never felt a thing as she rose and obliterated the house of her childhood. She surely felt the probable death of her mother!
She closed her eyes for a moment and then opened them again and settled down to the task at hand. There were nearly five hundred ships in various orbits around Grissom Station, the Fleet Base at the L1 Earth-Luna site.
In spite of the number she was able to narrow the list quite quickly, seeking a particular target. She found one and when she had checked it out, she smiled. The moon wasn’t very far from the L1 point. Ships parked there were ranked in various degrees based on when they were going to move. Still, orbits more widely removed from the L1 point became progressively less stable.
The Alabama was a dedicated survey ship, having just returned from a yearlong survey mission. It was due to go back out again in another few weeks, and there was exactly one officer aboard, monitoring station keeping. The Alabama was due in three days to start a refit, but in the meantime the only concern was keeping her in position.
Yolanda could turn over on her lunar orbit at the proper time, and when the time was right, apply a sudden burst of acceleration to change where she would end up. She smiled as she modified her flight profile. She had had the better part of two hours to hack the Alabama’s AI. She would declare an emergency, brake so that she ended up about sixty kilometers from the L1 point, a dozen from the Alabama. She would turn off her transponder and in the next two minutes, close with the ship.
If her orbit didn’t intersect a major body, the orbital defense platforms would take at least two minutes to shoot, and by then she would have docked. Then they would hesitate to shoot because she would have a hostage. A minute after she was aboard the Alabama she would be accelerating and thirty-five seconds later she would be on High Fan and untouchable.
The worst part of the plan was the fifteen seconds she needed at fourteen gravities to kill her velocity towards the moon. That was the longest she had to stay on a steady course. If someone was extraordinarily quick on the trigger they could nail her. After the fourteen seconds she would use random accelerations, and while she might take a pounding, it was better than a laser strike. The problem with maneuvering this close to Grissom was that most of the ships out here were warships.
Her plan started off without a hitch, even if it left her mildly groggy. She had the Alabama under her control and hastily boarded her. The first problem was that she knew there was someone aboard and she didn’t see him on her way to the bridge.
Yolanda settled in an acceleration couch and activated the ship-wide intercom. “I know there is someone here. You have one minute from my mark to get into an acceleration couch, then we will depart at an average acceleration of five gravities, plus or minus three. If you aren’t secured, you will die or be severely injured. Move now; I have no desire to harm anyone. Mark!”
She put the unknown passenger in the back of her mind. She had to go and he would either move to a couch or she’d have to scrape him off the deck. She thought of her mother and hardened her heart.
She had grown up in the Federation, so she’d never heard the term personally directed to her. It was just something her mother had taught her. She was a “bio-engineered being” -- a “bing” for short. She had to wait until she was ten for her mother to explain the rest. A human being with something missing.
That had hurt and hurt badly. It was a shock to learn that her mother was a spy and Yolanda was destined to be one too. The “bing” appellation she’d never heard in reference to her, but people joked about “frankenvolk” all the time. Her mother had seen to it that Yolanda had read Shelley.
A ten-year-old does not understand adult motivations as well as all that.
The changes in acceleration kept her mind off the worst of it. There is nothing worse than going from two gravities to eight in a second. And while the reverse wasn’t true, it was still uncomfortable.
When they went to High Fan she got up and headed down to the Engineering Deck, where the cr
ewman was. She hoisted him over her shoulder and deposited him in one of the bridge positions, using security ties to secure him.
Then she turned to her instruments. They were repeaters from the Mad Hatter and gave a lot more data than regular instruments. It took one look and she realized that she was in real trouble.
The Union, her mother’s people, sneered at the stupid Federation. One of the main reasons was that the Union had long since learned to detect ships on any kind of fans, even High Fan, which, before the war, the Federation couldn’t detect.
Looking at her instruments, it was patently obvious that the Federation could now detect ships on High Fan. There were three blips very, very close -- maybe a hundred kilometers and matching her pace. There were two others, and if her instruments were to believed, much larger. Those were ships! And if the large objects were ships, the smaller ones had to be missiles!
She mentally gulped. The Federation had High Fan homing missiles! If she stopped, they would stop nearly as fast and a nuclear detonation -- or three -- would blot her from the universe.
Next to her, a voice said, “Gah! What did you do to me? Beat me with a stick?”
“Random accelerations from two to eight gravities for less than a half minute.”
“And you can move... function?”
“No laser struck us. Be thankful.”
“And what of the pursuit?”
Yolanda ignored that comment, too. But his next she couldn’t ignore.
He said, “The comm warning is blinking. They are trying to talk to you.”
“We are on High Fan, can’t you tell? They can’t talk to us.”
“Try it. You’ll be surprised. There are probably missiles up our ass and ships following at a safe distance. Talk to them, Miss, or we are both dead.”
“I can outrun those missiles,” Yolanda said firmly.
“You can’t outrun them. And if you think you can outlast them, inside Federation space, they’ll vector new missiles on you.”
“Impossible. Word can’t travel faster than a ship.”
“We have linked a large fraction of the Federation up with latch-frame.”
“Impossible. That would take decades.”
“We put communications relays a light year apart; it’s about ninety percent done.”
Yolanda thought about that. It certainly sounded like a plausible strategy, although it would take a staggering number of ships. News reports she had seen said that the Fleet was building “thousands” of ships had been dismissed by Yolanda’s mother as a “likely understatement.”
Thinking of her mother hardened her heart. “Shut up!”
Evidently he was on the road to mending. “You are on High Fan. Switch on the comms. No risk, no gain.”
She contemplated that. She got up and walked over to the man and grabbed his shirt and looked into his eyes. She doubted if anyone could work himself up to suicide so fast and not show any trace of it on his face.
She let him go and turned to the comm link. “Alabama, please respond,” a voice was repeating over and over.
She turned to the man. “If you utter a sound, I will switch off the comm link, then turn around and kill you.”
“Lady, if you think that’s a surprise, you’ll be surprised. I’m in no position to do anything.”
“Hush, now,” Yolanda told him. He made a zipping motion to his lips and Yolanda flipped the switch. “Alabama here.”
The voice stopped at the first word she spoke. “Miss Ruiz, there are three missiles alongside you. If you drop from High Fan, you will be destroyed.”
“I see them.”
“There are two ships in a trailing position, they are authorized to fire on you should evade the missiles. The fact that you have a hostage is too bad -- for the hostage.”
“I see the ships.”
“Then you have to know this is a fruitless attempt to hijack a Federation ship. Tell me you will cut your drives and I will safe the weapons and tell the ships to stand down. You will be able to explain yourself to a Special Board.”
“You killed my mother today. Go to hell.”
“We haven’t killed anyone that I’m aware of, Miss Ruiz.”
The first voice was replaced with a deeper voice. “Miss Ruiz, is your mother Juanita Ruiz?”
“Of course.”
“She was found murdered today.”
“By your Federation!”
There was a perceptible pause before the voice spoke again. “Miss Ruiz, I’m going to give a great many of my people a very great deal of gas -- but are you familiar with the Union?”
Yolanda blanched, but didn’t speak.
“I am, Miss Ruiz, Admiral of the Fleet Ernest Fletcher. The Federation is, at this moment, in negotiations with the Union. My people have reported that a plot was underway to kill all of the Union stay behinds... instigated by the Union government.
“I assure you, Miss Ruiz, that the Federation doesn’t leave the people we execute floating face down in the Thames.”
“I want to go home, is all,” Yolanda said when she regained her balance.
“Your hostage is a particularly well thought of young officer. If he comes to no harm and if you return the ship you have taken, I am prepared to drop the very, very serious charges against you,” the voice on the other end of the line said. “As a gesture of goodwill, you would be repatriated to the Union.”
“I’ll get back to you,” Yolanda told the voice and cut the link.
She leaned forward and rested her head on the controls. Her mother was dead. Really and truly dead. Was the man lying? He certainly sounded like Fletcher, who had been on the news often. He knew at least enough about the Union to know its name.
Everything her mother had told her about the Union -- what was the truth? She learned as a little girl that the Union didn’t have a death penalty. Had that changed? If so, what had possessed them to kill their own people after centuries of faithful service? There was something seriously wrong somewhere!
“Miss, I don’t understand everything that was just said. But if your mother is dead... I can’t begin to say how sorry I am for your loss.”
Yolanda sat up and turned to him, studying him for a time. “He said you are well thought of. What is your area of endeavor?”
“I am a mathematician, specializing in codes. That’s all I’m allowed to tell my spouse, not that I have one.”
“It is a trivial task these days to generate unbreakable codes using quantum cryptography.”
“Not everyone goes to that length,” he told Yolanda.
“Of course they do!” she replied. “You are working on something else... have you got recordings of alien communications?”
He shook his head. “I can’t say one way or the other.”
“Humor me. Play one for me.”
“Something like that would be classified in one of the highest categories in the Federation. I’m well thought of, but not that well.”
“Working alone, with no one to hear, no one to interrupt you -- that would be ideal.”
“I am a junior lieutenant, working on my bridge watchkeeping syllabus.”
Yolanda laughed. “In case you didn’t notice, I have your ship’s AI in my back pocket.” A strange sound came from the console.
“Again,” Yolanda said. The young man cursed with feeling.
“Instrument readings,” she told him. “A very interesting language. I’d have to say a very alien language.”
“Are you one of them?”
“Not!” she retorted. “You’ve never met anyone who can do signal analysis in her head before?” she laughed and gestured at the comm console. “If that really was Ernest Fletcher, he spoke our name. The Union of Free Peoples.”
“It was him. Trust me, that was Uncle Ernie.”
“Ah! That well thought of! You know us as ‘Koopianers.’”
The young man blinked, started to say something and then stopped. He huffed a sigh. “We called them, in the end, ‘
Frankenvolk.’”
“At home they call people like me ‘bings.’ A human being with something missing.”
“Christ!”
“How old do you think I am?”
“At first I thought twenty or so, now I think a lot older.”
“In another week, I will celebrate my fifteenth birthday.”
“Please, tell me about that recording.”
Yolanda laughed. “Alien. We speak a series of sounds, one after another. The aliens speak 4096 phonemes at a time, in different frequency buckets. It took a second repetition before I realized that numbers are base 8, and are represented by different durations.”
“And that’s all?”
“Their language is alien. I have no referents. The instrument readings are clear. What instruments, what units are being measured aren’t nearly as simple.”
“Aren’t simple? Does that mean you understand some of them?”
“The transmission was environmental readings. There was a sudden change in some of the readings -- then they stopped.”
“The ship had been hit a glancing shot from a Blue, in the engineering spaces. The controls failed; the alien experienced a sudden acceleration transient, killing the crew. The thought is they use cyborgs -- brains divorced from bodies.”
He paused. “Please, please. Surrender. Humanity needs you. Let me talk to Admiral Fletcher. Please.
“We are nearly out of comm range, Miss. Please, for all of our sakes. Let me talk to him.”
Yolanda grimaced. “If they blow us up, you’ll die beside me.”
“Please.”
Yolanda flipped the switch and spoke simply. “Tell me when I can cut the drives. Your well thought of young man wishes to say something.”
“Give me two minutes for the missiles to stop tracking. The ships will stand off at six light minutes.”
“Uncle,” the young man said, “I have completed the preliminary work on my cousin’s wedding invitations. It would be a shame if anything happened to the new designer.”
“Is that a fact?”
“Yes, sir. The calligraphy still has to be done, but the basic picture is complete.”
The Odyssey and the Iliad (Kinsella Universe Book 7) Page 19
