Daryl had taken the point position in the early fighting and had been exposed to the most fire before the others had taken their positions. Even the best combat armor can only take so much abuse before it fails. Fleeing slaves carried his body to the ship doing what they could to stop the bleeding.
An artillery shell landed adjacent to Janet’s position, killing two of the other Marines. One of the MMARV’s was destroyed in the blast. Shielded from the shrapnel by the MMARV, Janet and one other Marine were knocked to the ground. Covered by another MMARV, the slaves collected them and brought them to the waiting ship.
The plan for the battle in space was for the destroyers to attack the heavily defended orbiting observation platforms. Wendy piloted one of the destroyers and Raphael Rivera piloted the other. By carefully hyper jumping into position, firing missiles and jumping away, they destroyed most of the unmanned platforms. They attacked the manned platforms. One of the manned platforms had a volley ready when they appeared. The volley was concentrated on Wendy’s ship. The ship sustained so much damage that Wendy abandoned it, but not before she and her crew rode it into the atmosphere. They rode the crippled ship down as long as they could before ejecting their escape capsules.
The P I ships once again proved their combat hardiness and destroyed every ship that challenged them without sustaining significant damage themselves.
The ground battle raged through the night. By dawn it appeared that everyone who wanted to leave either had done so or died in the attempt. The flight line was littered with bodies. Entire families had died together. The wounded had been dragged to the ships by the living. The poison gas plant still burned furiously. The toxic smoke billowed across the farm land. Anyone who had tried to stay had probably succumbed to the fumes within the first few hours of the night. Fortunately, the wind had carried the smoke away from the space port, but with the coming of the dawn, the winds shifted and the smoke turned toward the ships on the flight line. Weakened due to the blood loss from her wounds, supporting herself with the side of the med-evac ship’s loading ramp, Suwanee surveyed the carnage one more time before giving the order for the last ship to leave. Two of the surviving Marines hauled her up the ramp and closed the doors.
Unchallenged, the last med-evac ship left Brainerd’s Folly for the Albert Schweitzer.
DEPLOYMENT - CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
RACHEL WAS PREPARING TO RECALL the remains of her fleet and have them dock and regroup when Buddy called in, “INCOMING! We have multiple drive signatures incoming.”
Captain Alina Darwin was piloting Buddy. She was on the far side of the planet from the Schweitzer’s location. “It looks like a large convoy,” she reported.
The ships were too far away for the Schweitzer’s sensors to pick them up, but Buddy’s sensors were ideally suited for the task given his location.
“Two heavy cruisers, ten destroyers, pickets deploying,” Buddy relayed the information as it became available.
“It looks like Swordsmen judging by the shape of the formation,” Alina offered.
“Four cargo ships, two passenger liners. Transponders indicate these ships are definitely Swordsman.” Buddy added.
“You need to get out of here,” Alina stated flatly.
“What about you?” Rachel asked.
“We have four hyper capable P I ships and a hyper capable destroyer. We are can make it home on our own. We’ll follow you after we rescue Wendy and her crew.” Alina replied.
Reuben looked up from his engineering station, “With as many passengers as we’re carrying, the last thing this ship needs is the weight of the P I’s and Destroyer as cargo.”
David put his hand on Rachel’s shoulder. “We need to go. We’re going to run out of food two days before we get there even if we leave now.”
Rachel looked into his eyes beseechingly. “We can’t leave them behind.”
“We have no choice. We have seven thousand people on this ship. We need to get them to safety before they and we starve,” David reminded her.
“What will Joshua say?”
“When he gets out of surgery in a week or so, he’ll understand. Right now, he’s helping put Suwanee back together. Besides, we need to get these people to proper medical facilities before more of them die of their wounds. Our medical teams have way more work than they can handle.”
As if to punctuate David’s remarks, Lt. Sabrina Mahoney called in from the other side of the system. She was piloting Daisy. “Folks, we have more company! They’re P A F! There’s at least one ship as big as the one we fought at Everest! Get the refugees out of here! We’ll fend for ourselves.”
Daisy reported, “This convoy numbers at least fifty ships. I see one battleship. Heavy escort. Sensors report cargo and passenger vessels. Definitely fusion drives on the bigger ships.”
“This looks like a colonization fleet,” Sabrina ventured.
J T looked up from his console. The sedative had only knocked him down for a couple of hours. He was still upset at having lost Luther, but decided to focus his anger on constructive activity. He had insisted on returning to his console in spite of medical advice to the contrary. His expression was thoughtful and determined. “Three MMARV still working. One AARV good. Reprogram Med ship. Control MMARV. Need pilot. Rescue Wendy and crew.”
Mimi and Esther had been quietly whispering in the corner. “We’ll take J T.”
J T pulled a data module from his pocket and plugged it into his console. “Download MMARV op system,” he commanded.
“Downloading,” Elizabeth replied.
Rashi picked a data module from a drawer in his console and plugged it in. “Download AARV operating system. I’m going with you.”
Rachel looked at Reuben as he stood from his console. “You’re staying here. Somebody has to hold this ship together on the ride home.”
“Aye, Captain.”
When the downloads were complete, Esther and Rashi raced for one of the two surviving med-evac ships. Mimi and J T raced for the other. Convincing the ships’ regular crews to turn the ships over to the rescue teams was not difficult and the two ships quickly separated from the Schweitzer. The two med-evac ships raced for the relative protection of the debris fields left from the recent battle.
As soon as she felt it was safe to do so, Rachel ordered the engines fired and plotted the fastest course for Eretz and safety. The passengers already knew that the food would not last the trip, but most seemed willing to endure the hardship in return for being set free.
DEPLOYMENT - CHAPTER THIRTY
WENDY’S ESCAPE CAPSULE SKIDDED to a stop upside down in the middle of a desert. The capsule’s sensors detected no life, either friendly or hostile, within a five kilometer radius of her location. Neither did they detect water. As Wendy saw it, the good news was that she was alive. The bad news was that her chances of surviving in this environment did not look great. Her capsule had been the last to leave the ship so she knew that her crew had landed and they were alive. The others had landed in territory considerably more hospitable than where she had come down, but they were scattered across a huge expanse of territory. She had reported her crash location to the others once the capsule finally ground to a halt. They had agreed to try and gather near a waterfall on a river Wendy had spotted on her way down and was now a couple hundred kilometers away.
If there had been anyone to watch, the spectacle of Wendy’s escape capsule awkwardly rolling itself over using the docking engagement arms would have been amusing. The capsule creaked as it turned before it settled upright with a large cloud of dust. Wendy fastened her E V A helmet while she waited for the dust to clear. She was thankful for the recent advances in flight suit technology that had eliminated the bulk from the old E V A suits her parents had used. The new suits were light enough and strong enough that the standard flight suit became the E V A suit with the addition of a helmet and the life support back pack. The back pack carried power for all the suit’s functions and weaponry. It contained a supply
of liquid nutrient solution designed to keep the suit’s occupant alive for weeks as well as the plumbing and recycling equipment. The suit fabric was woven from photo voltaic and piezoelectric materials so that it generated electricity when the suit was exposed to light or vibration. The electronics woven into the suit’s fabric doubled as an armored coating that covered the entire body.
Wendy secured the helmet before opening the hatch. She knew that the air outside the capsule was probably breathable due to the distance she had come down from the burning poison gas plant, but she kept the helmet sealed because she needed to preserve her water. The suit would recycle the water she exhaled and not let it escape. The water purification system in the back pack would keep her supplied with recycled water as long as the suit had power. She collected as much food as she could carry from the capsule’s storage and climbed out of the capsule. The nutrient solution would keep her alive and would be adequate if she was dealing with the vacuum of space, but solid food would be worth opening her helmet for a couple times a day.
The ground was hot enough for Wendy to feel the heat through her boots. She set the compass display in her helmet for the direction she wanted to travel and headed out. It would only be a matter of time before she walked to within communication range of the rest of her crew. Wendy mentally prepared herself for a very long journey across the hot sand.
DEPLOYMENT - CHAPTER THIRTY ONE
THE FLIGHT CREWS UNDER Captain Alina Darwin’s command who stayed behind watched the flare as the Albert Schweitzer transitioned to hyper drive and headed home. They were too far away to see the ship itself, but the flare would certainly be picked up by the two convoys now entering the system.
Not convinced that hiding in the debris fields would provide enough cover, Alina ordered the med-evac ships and the destroyer to meet the four P I ships on the surface of the planet’s lone airless moon. Finding a level spot, they parked in a row while J T and Rashi reprogrammed the med-evac ships flight engineering consoles to enable them to control the combat machines still on the surface.
Communicating by laser, they waited and watched as the two fleets approached. Anticipating the need for even greater stealth than the laser communication would allow, the remaining destroyer pilot, Lt. Raphael Rivera, his fire control officer and flight engineer donned their E V A suits and manually connected the fiber optic lines between the ships. They powered down the ships to the minimum necessary to operate life support and their passive sensors.
The ensuing battle between the Swordsmen and the P A F fleets was brutal. The Swordsmen were landed some of their passenger and cargo ships before the fighting started. Several of the landings looked more like controlled crashes than anything planned. The P A F initiated the attack. The military components of both fleets attempted to protect their civilian vessels from damage while trying to break though the other’s defensive line to attack their civilian fleet. Both forces relied on the same basic tactic. They ran at each other head on until they reached the limits of their missile ranges and threw immense barrages of missiles at each other. When they had suffered as much damage as they could sustain, they retreated. For the better part of a week, they lunged forward, fought and fell back.
At no time did any of the ships attempt a short hyper jump. A half dozen destroyers or P I type ships could have turned the course of the battle merely by hyper jumping behind the battle lines of the opposing force and attacking the unprotected rear echelons. As Greg had taught the Eretz pilots, the short hyper jump can be a devastatingly effective tactical maneuver and yet neither fleet used it. If they did not use it, that probably meant that they were not prepared to defend against it. This observation was not lost on Captain Darwin’s small task force. The Federation ships appeared to have a tactical advantage their potential opponents did not have.
The P A F and Swordsmen had apparently previously scanned the planet from orbit and determined places to establish their colonies. Both locations were well away from the cloud of deadly gas which was already dissipating. Although the Swordsmen were the first to land on the planet’s surface, they were not safe from attack. P A F ships attacked the landing sites even as the transports were unloading. The Swordsmen ably defended themselves with rapidly deployed missile batteries and ground based artillery but not without taking their share of casualties. When the shooting finally stopped, all the P A F military ships had been destroyed. What remained of their civilian fleet attempted to descend to the surface at a distance from the location where the Swordsmen were putting down. If either group could have been said to have “won” this battle, it was the Swordsmen only because when it was over some of their military survived.
Other than the scale of the carnage, what amazed the small Federation contingent hiding quietly on the moon more than anything else was how little the two opposing forces relied on stealth. Their ship-to-ship communications were not encrypted or coded which made monitoring the battle easier than they had any reason to expect. The P A F space fleet had been completely destroyed. The contingent that had landed on the surface contained some military units, but their strength was not clear to the observers quietly parked on the moon. A dozen small and mid-sized ships were all that remained of the Swordsmen military space fleet. The Swordsmen elected not to attack the P A F settlements on the ground, but chose to deploy the few ships they had left as a defensive warning net. The net was so thin, that while it would prevent Captain Darwin’s crew from descending to the planet, it was not enough to fend off even a loosely coordinated pirate attack of more than a few ships.
Once on the surface, the Swordsmen used the aircraft that they had brought with them to survey the planet. The survey team quickly mapped the space port which had so recently been the site of the earlier battle. They were appalled at the numbers of dead who remained scattered around the flight line. They clearly were surprised to find the battle over and the inhabitants gone. They remarked on how little destruction there had been to the structures. Once the gas dissipated, the old spaceport would be a prize worth fighting over.
Crews wearing E V A suits were dispatched to the space port to clear it and bury the dead. The Swordsmen intended to establish their new settlement in the buildings that remained on the site. Only two buildings had been completely destroyed, the gas plant and the military traffic control center. Once the gas cleared and the place was cleaned up, the spaceport would be habitable again.
DEPLOYMENT - CHAPTER THIRTY TWO
AFTER CAREFULLY EXAMINING the ship’s internal stress monitors, Reuben authorized acceleration to 1.2 G for the trip home. Even though the combined mass of the passengers was significant, the reduction in the ship’s total mass due to the loss or abandonment of the ships that had previously been attached as well as the expense of most of the ship’s munitions, gave Reuben the safety margin he felt he needed to bring the ship home faster than he had previously advised. Even at the greater speed, the ship’s supply of food ran out a full day before they dropped out of hyper drive.
The passenger liner had been designed to support fifteen hundred passengers and five hundred crew. Its life support and recycling systems had been designed with triple redundancy. Two thirds of the refugees had settled there. Many of them slept on the floors of the passageways. By the end of the trip, the passenger ship’s systems were no longer keeping up with the load and the air in the ship had started to become stale with CO2 reaching uncomfortable levels. The civilian medical personnel who had been quartered in the passenger ship moved into the battleship along with the military personnel. Refugees filled the remainder of the hospital ship’s and the battleship’s vacant rooms. Some of the refugees sought the relatively open space of the cargo ship’s hold. The ship’s engineers devoted most of their energies and attention to the life support systems because a failure of any major component could jeopardize their ability to survive the trip.
The ship dropped out of hyper drive at one of the Eretz designated arrival points, was greeted by the regular escort and wa
s directed to the spaceport. Rachel called in to inform the port authority of the status of the ship and its passengers as soon as the ship was in range.
Admiral Sherman had not returned from Earth. His representative, a very angry Commodore Levine, mandated that the personnel assigned to the Schweitzer, both military and civilian, remain on-board until all the freed slaves had been properly processed.
The first food that came on board were M R E’s and for the first time anyone could remember, no one complained about having to eat them.
Rose interceded on Kenneth and Astrid’s behalf, but her efforts to spring Rachel from “house arrest” were met with stone cold resistance. Rachel’s four cousins headed to the surface under armed guard. During the two weeks they had traveled from Brainerd’s Folly to Eretz they had time to get to know each other since Rachel allowed them the use of her quarters.
Isaac and Joshua had spent the time in transit in the operating rooms doing the best they could to save as many lives and limbs as possible. Medical examiners would later describe much of what the medical team accomplished as miraculous. In the eerie silence that followed the departure of seven thousand passengers, the only thing on all the ship’s crew’s minds was sleep. The fact that they were confined to the ship was less significant than the fact that they could, for the first time in two weeks, get uninterrupted sleep. Shortly after landing, Dr. Constance Terrell, better known as “Tyrannosaurus Doc”, passed out in a chair and slept for an entire day. Many of the other medical and administrative personnel who had been pressed into helping the medics found flat places on the floor near where they had been working for the last two weeks and collapsed in exhaustion.
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