Tiger: Enemy Mine (Tiger Tales Book 3)

by David Smith

  They seemed to have reached an impasse, but Jalai broke the silence that pervaded the chamber.

  ‘Elders, I speak as one who has already made my thoughts known. Like yourselves, I have seen the depredations visited upon our people by the Terrans. Abuse. Enslavement. Death. If that is our lot, then so be it, but if we do have any choice, that choice must surely be better than to stay and be subjugated by our enemy. I know I speak for the survivors of Joran Dal and Cho-dal-far when I say that we should move on, even if only to keep hope alive a little longer.’

  The Council looked at each other and nodded silently to one another. Councillor Dalan spoke for them all. ‘We have conferred at length prior to your arrival and your argument here has served to confirm our thinking. Our discussions with Parliament have been fruitless, and they will not permit us to leave the disputed zone. We have therefore elected to seek a habitable star-system within the disputed zone that we believe will be of no military significance to the Empire. We intend to re-locate our remaining citizens thence, and make that our last home. Life will be hard. We have few resources to take with us. But as you say, better that than the alternative.’

  The old Sha T’Al pulled himself upright and still showed the grace and dignity that was ubiquitous amongst his people. ‘We will recommend to the populace that they evacuate, but cannot insist on it as Councillor Paurin and I have already elected to stay, regardless of what follows. Councillor Canassi will lead our people and form a Council with Jalai at our people’s last home. We regard this matter as concluded. You are excused.’

  Jalai motioned for Dave to follow him out of the chamber, and Dave realised that there was nothing more to be said. The decision had been made and it was absolute.

  Outside, he looked at Jalai and said ‘How many of the populace will choose to leave?’

  Jalai sighed and suddenly looked troubled. ‘If the council had left as one, I believe all of them would have followed. But Dalan is proud, and will not abandon the work of his entire lifetime. I believe many will stay purely out of loyalty to him. Paurin too has a following, smaller, but no less loyal. I fear that thousands will stay here and face the consequences.’

  ‘Is there nothing we can do?’ asked Dave.

  ‘There is only hope, now’ said Jalai sadly.

  --------------------

  Dave returned to Tiger and briefed the senior staff on the situation.

  ‘The Local Sha T’Al have been denied the chance to go into Sha T’Al home-world territory. They’ve elected to try and get out of harm’s way by finding an isolated star-system close to the Sha T’Al – Tana border. Elder Jalai thinks most of the population will go, but a significant number may stay here and take their chances.’

  There were murmurs all around the conference table, but Dave held his hand up. ‘It’s not our position to judge. Jalai has made it clear the decision is final. All we have to do is help them as much as we can. The Empire transports are in better shape than the Sha T’Al fleet, so we’re going to use them for the evacuation.’

  ‘Crash, I want you and Lyle to take a team across to the transport vessels, Jalai will send up suitable candidates for a crash course in operations and ship-handling. Romanov, I want engineers to check each ship over and make sure it has a clean bill of health. I also need you to work with the Sha T’Al’s engineer’s to make sure they have one team of bodies that can fix anything that’s likely to go wrong with the transports. Commander Mengele I want you and your opposite number to keep working on treatments for the Sha T’Al. Lieutenant-Commander O’Mara, I want you to send a team down to the surface to support Van der Vaart and Alvari. I want the Sha T’Al to understand everything you’ve discovered so far and I need the team to assist them in setting up a manufacturing facility for the drugs that you’ve developed.’

  There was a buzz of excitement around the table with everyone having a set of positive actions to focus on, but Dave had to point out one last thing.

  ‘Ok team, you know what you have to do. Now comes the bad news. We’ve given the Terran Empire a bloody nose and I don’t think that will be taken kindly. I don’t know how long it’ll take, but it’s an absolute certainty that the Empire will be baying for blood. Our blood. We have stay focused, get this done and get the hell out of here as soon as we possibly can. Let’s make it happen. Dismissed.’

  --------------------

  The next few days were as busy as Dave could ever remember. He took an active role in helping Jalai sort out the logistics of the evacuation, whilst keep a weather eye on all the other million things that needed doing.

  He was exhausted, and after a long day had fallen into a deep sleep in his cabin when Lieutenant Cavaleiro called him from the Bridge. Dave sat up, rubbing his eyes and answered.

  ‘Sorry to disturb you sir, but you have an incoming call.’

  ‘Aw, what the hell can’t wait until morning??’

  ‘Don’t know sir, but I really recommend you take the call. After all, it is from yourself.’

  Chapter 12

  Two minutes later, Dave was on the Bridge and threw himself into the Captain’s chair. ‘On screen, please’

  Cavaleiro put the message up on the main-view screen.

  ‘Good . . . er . . . morning Dave’ said the face on the screen.

  Dave sat silently, gently pinching himself to make sure he was awake.

  ‘You ok? Hey, that’s weird, I remember me saying that!’

  Up in front of him on the view-screen was Commander Dave Hollins, looking tired, and oddly smug. Off to one side of him, Lieutenant Janus leaned into frame, a huge grin on his face. Dave couldn’t help but notice that this Janus had a row of stitches in a nasty gash on his fore-head.

  Dave’s head still wasn’t fully functional and he asked ‘What the hell is going on?’ more for his own benefit than anyone else’s.

  On-screen Dave sighed. ‘We don’t have time for this. It should be . . . ‘ he checked with someone off-screen ‘ . . . 2218 ship’s time at your end, correct?’

  Dave nodded his confirmation blankly.

  His alter-ego continued ‘Which means that in about six hours and twelve minutes, the rest of the Terran Empire’s fleet in the disputed zone will drop out of warp, right on top of us.’

  ‘WHAT??? How . . . when . . . who?’

  Dave had so many questions they seemed to trip over each other in the rush to get out of his mouth.

  His other self continued. ‘Before you ask I’m not the rebel Dave Hollins, I’m you. Or at least I will be in five days time. You’re on a ship that’s effectively a time machine, remember?’

  Dave could only nod blankly in the direction of the view-screen. His jaw had stopped flapping, but tiny bit of drool was leaking out of the corner of his gaping mouth.

  The turbo-lift doors opened and ASBeau and Crash stepped out. Both did a double-take ‘What the fu . . . ‘

  ‘Hey guys!’ said the on-screen Dave. ‘Glad you turned up, this’ll make things easier. I was just telling myself that there’s an Imperial fleet on its way, and it’s not transports this time. It’s the rest of the warships that have been contesting the disputed zone. They’ve swept through the space to clear out the last Tana warships, and are due to meet the assault fleet you’ve already captured and support the invasion of Todot Hahn.’

  Dave, ASBeau and Crash were all silent now.

  ‘Hellooooo???? Anyone still there?’ asked Dave’s alter-ego. ‘Jeez, I didn’t think this would be that hard. Hang on . . . ‘

  The image on the screen disappeared, but the audio connection remained open. ‘Is that better?’

  Dave nodded dumbly, still too stupefied to realise that with visual link off, his other self wouldn’t see this.

  The disembodied voice continued ‘Soooo . . . to recap, there’s a group of Imperial warships due here in about six hours. The fleet centres around an old heavy cruiser. There are also three light cruisers and a scout ship. We’re out-gunned, so we need to have a plan. Here’s what
we’re going to do . . .

  --------------------

  They planned to intercept the Empire fleet in deep space to reduce the risk to the transport fleet in orbit around Todot Hahn. Their plan required the Tana battleship to be manned as well as the little Sha T’Al scout vessel.

  For reasons that became increasingly difficult to understand, Dave from five days in the future, couldn’t provide crew for the Tana vessel as he’d already done so five days in his own past.

  After trying very, very hard to get his head around the dynamics of the situation, Dave gave up and decided to trust himself and do as he was told. The trip between the two Sha T’Al worlds had indicated that they’d need around eighty-five crew as an absolute minimum to man the huge ship for combat.

  After much agonizing, Dave elected to put his senior operations staff back on the battleship as they’d already gathered some experience of operating the ship on the previous journey.

  He then sent Pappy Jackson and Aline Dubois, his senior torpedo and phaser chiefs, across with their best teams to man the weapons. Tiger would be forced to use the relief crews, but Dave had to acknowledge that they’d all acquitted themselves well on the Arcturus Test Ranges when revalidating Tiger for active service.

  Stavros was first to leave, taking a small crew in the Sha T’Al scout vessel to attempt to locate the Empire fleet. Dave called to confirm the heading the three larger ships would be taking.

  ‘Ok Stavros, all set?’

  ‘Ok Falcon, Tiger and . . . uh . . . ‘ (what was big and slow and grey, but potentially very dangerous? Aha!!) ‘ . . . Rhino will ship out on the prearranged heading. We’ll split at the stated co-ordinates unless you advise of a change of course by the Empire fleet.’ Dave was about to cut the link, but paused to offer a last instruction.

  ‘Be careful Stavros, We’ve assumed that the Empire scouts are an analogue of Federation scouts. If they’re more capable than that you could be in trouble.’

  ‘No worries sir, the cruisers won’t be able to catch us. Even if they see us, the most likely course of action would be to dispatch their scout vessel to drive us away and we should be fine with a bit of a head start. This’ll be a piece of cake’ said the Deck Officer confidently.

  ‘Ok, but any hint that anything’s not going to plan, I want you out of there. Is that clear?’

  ‘Aye sir!’

  ‘Then good luck Falcon, we’ll be seeing you again soon.’

  Dave switched the main view-screen to an external camera angle and watched as Stavros swung the tiny scout vessel smoothly up and out of orbit.

  Once she’d gone, Dave called ASBeau on the Bridge of the Tana battleship. ‘All set ASBeau?’

  ‘Yes sir. With your permission we’ll conduct a few test firings on the way out of the system just to check we’ve got everything up and working?’ said his Tactical Officer hopefully.

  ‘I guess that would be sensible. Try not to do too much damage, we want the Sha T’Al to view us as friends!’ said Dave grudgingly.

  ‘No problem sir, we’ll just pop a couple of asteroids in the Oort cloud on our way.’

  ‘Ok, Tiger will lead, and just by the by, we’ve christened your vessel Rhino.‘

  ASBeau thought about it and shrugged ‘Yeah, I can see that. In that case, Rhino out!’ he smiled and cut the comm-link.

  Dave settled back in the Captain’s chair. It was time. ‘Lieutenant Farnell, plot a course to intercept point as briefed, Lieutenant Lyle, take us out, ahead one third.’

  ‘Aye sir, ahead one third. Mmmmm!’ Janice moaned.

  Tiger turned and began to climb out of orbit.

  --------------------

  Once they were underway, Dave began the serious work of preparing for the battle to come.

  If things went to plan, they could disable the Imperial fleet with minimal casualties. If things didn’t go to plan, he’d be depending on the relief crew to fight the ship against a superior enemy force.

  The Falcon was of little tactical value, as she had no operational shields and no torpedoes. The Rhino was heavily armed and protected but wasn’t mobile enough to present a serious threat to the Imperial fleet on her own. Her real purpose was to distract the imperial ships as they were apparently on a mission to clear the disputed zone of Tana forces.

  If she couldn’t engage the more agile Imperial vessels, that would leave the two versions of Tiger to face a heavy cruiser and three light cruisers, not great odds even with their unintentional stealth capability.

  He trusted the crew of Rhino to do their bit, and it was down to him and Lieutenant Janus to make sure the relief tactical crew of Tiger did their bit too.

  The plan would almost certainly involve the ships engaging at sub-light velocities as the Empire vessels would be disadvantaged by the number of torpedo tubes the Tana vessel could bring to bear in a supra-light speed engagement: Rhino had twenty tubes compared to Tiger’s two.

  Below the speed of light the Imperial cruisers would be able to bring their energy weapons to bear. They would have a considerable advantage in that event, as the phasers mounted on their four cruisers were far more capable than the micro-wave lasers the Tana battleship carried.

  Both Tigers would have to drop out of warp-drive too, which meant that they too could rely on their heavy phasers. They’d also would then have the extra advantage of being even more stealthy as they wouldn’t leave the tell-tale sub-space disturbance of a warp field.

  The down-side of this was that the relief phaser crew were a motley crew, even by Tiger’s standards.

  They were led by Chief Sally Amiss, who knew more about phasers than anyone Dave had ever met. She was an absolute genius in her field, but was far, far too nice to be a crew Chief. Working under her were three PO’s, one for each phaser bank.

  Jari Hirvonen, David Mann and Mercedes Bent were all technically competent, but were as disparate a bunch as you could meet. Hirvonen was a Finn, banished to the relief shifts mostly on account of his habit of eating his favourite dish, surstromming, whilst on duty. Whilst this didn’t breach regulations per se, it was hard to ignore. Surstromming was an ancient Scandinavian delicacy, consisting of fermented herring in a tin. The tins physically bulged under the pressure of the gases building up inside, and opening them could make a strong man vomit on the spot. Hirvonen was obsessed with the stuff, and had such a robust constitution that he was probably the only person in the entire crew apart from Chief Burns who actually enjoyed haggis.

  PO David Mann was, if anything, weirder. He was a native of Earth too, but had never been able to satisfactorily or consistently explain his nationality. He spoke English and several other Terran languages completely free of any recognizable accent or dialect, but knew little of the geography or society of any part of old Earth.

  He was also unique in Tiger’s crew in being the only person aboard with literally no sense of humour. Telling David any joke was an exercise in patience and clarification. Stranger than that, things that the crew took completely for granted had to be explained to him in detail. Dave had been present the first time he’d been given a banana to eat, and . . . well . . . it had taken a lot of explaining.

  Of the three PO’s in the relief phaser crew Dave had met PO Mercedes Bent most often. A native of Essex in the United Kingdom, Janus had first described her to Dave as ‘All tits, tats and attitude.’ Dave’s experience of the pneumatically bosomed and heavily tattooed Essex-girl had mostly been at disciplinary hearings.

  Every shore leave she took involved some misadventure and reading back through her career record it seemed that any run ashore by the excitable and potty-mouthed Brit entailed a combination of sex, alcohol, drugs, violence, STD’s and arrests. Most often it was all of them and Bent left an overnight bag and a stock of anti-biotics in the Brig as matter of course.

  The enlisted personnel were just as bad. A pair were assigned to each PO to operate a phaser bank, and the usual six were crewmen Phaedra Hart, Lizzie Holden, Karen Walsh, Andrei Makarov,
Hannah Wright and Robin Staines

  Amiss had the unenviable task of pairing them off. Walsh hated Hart, Hart hated everyone, and everyone hated Walsh.

  Karen ‘Kitty’ Walsh was the queen of mean, and was bitchy for the sake of it. She never had a good word to say about anyone and delighted in making cutting remarks at others expense.

  Phaedra Hart was a striking, but aggressive goth, who was also a regular at disciplinary hearings, most commonly for striking Walsh.

  Nobody wanted to work with poor Makarov, who was a descendent of the very first Russian settlers to leave earth. Their inadequately shielded reactors had led to massive genetic defects among their unborn children, and even a seventh generation descendent such as “Oddie” Makarov still bore the scars. At Arcturus, he’d been on the team that bagged a 100% score in a target shooting exercise, and even the street-wise and mentally tough Hart had been freaked out by his offer of a celebratory ‘high-six-and-a-half’.

  Nobody liked working with Hannah Wright either. ‘Always’ Wright, as she was known, was agonizingly argumentative and would argue with anyone, over anything. She had to have the last word in any argument, and such heated discussions usually led to the other party storming off. The exception to this was Hart who usually terminated such conflicts with a fist and yet another visit to the disciplinary board.

  At least Makarov and Wright wanted to work. Lizzie ‘Bones’ Holden was the laziest person Dave had ever met, and had slept through most of the last two weeks at Arcturus. And Robin ‘Sick-note’ Staines took hypochondria to an entirely new level. He was so terrified of being ill that he regularly braved the withering bedside manner of Commander Mengele to discuss symptoms of mysterious illnesses that were only apparent to himself.

  His knowledge of human illnesses was encyclopaedic, as he was convinced he was suffering from any number of them. So great was his knowledge that Commander Mengele had considered co-opting him to the medical Team when she’d been short handed, but Staines had flatly refused as he didn’t ‘want to catch anything from a bunch of sick people.’