I understood. Grace was the only one there who hadn't experienced communal living, and probably had never been naked in front of anyone before. Let alone deliberately exposing herself to a man, dated or otherwise. I wondered how hard it had been for the others to talk her into it. Pretty hard I suspected. The last time anyone had seen less than her belt suit, was at the beach where she'd worn a one piece swimmer, when everyone else but Annabelle had been topless.
By the time I'd finished this line of thinking, I'd stripped off as well, and dropped into the spa next to Aline and Amanda. Grace was bright purple. I wondered if it was because I'd seen her naked, or because she'd just seen me naked for the first time. Or was I the first man she had seen naked? I sat and pondered in the bubbling hot water.
Ten minutes later, Amy and George walked in, stripped off, and joined us. Grace went purple again.
After another half hour, Jane requested my presence on the Bridge, so I hoisted myself out of the spa, triggered the shower, and Aline washed me all over while everyone else watched. Amanda and Aleesha popped out and dried me off, and after donning briefs and socks, I shifted to 'slinky red' and padded out. I was so glad my blush override hadn't failed me. I'd have to find a way of letting Grace know there was one.
Once back on the Bridge, Jane and I discussed the system. I had to make an effort to banish images of naked women from my mind, and concentrate on what Jane was saying.
"There is a fourth sun," she said. "It's on a very wide orbit around the entire rest of the system, and on an angle which from Earth would have seemed to be nothing to do with this system at all. It's another brown dwarf star, with a system of planets, but nothing habitable. Give it a few million years though, and one of them might be."
She showed me the orbital plot, and it could only be called eccentric. Hardly surprising though, considering what it was orbiting around. It was nice though to confirm what had been channeled.
"I've done a fast motion extrapolation of what I think happens on that planet we did the rescue on. It explains why there is no higher forms of life."
She ran it for me. Even limited to a one year projection, it was clear the continents changed size, shape, and viability constantly. Any life form trying to survive would need to move large distances rapidly, including moving across water. The whole planet was acting like a child's model, where the child constantly squeezed, prodded, and poked at it.
"The stresses must be incredible," I said.
"Yes. The system is too close to the two primary stars. And while I can't prove it, it looks like gravity on the planet changes at times, almost like sometimes there are multiple gravity conditions existing on opposite sides of the planet, acting to pull it apart. It's not enough to disintegrate the planet, but enough to cause it to be completely unstable."
"Any way to collect enough data to prove it?"
"Not unless we stay in orbit for a long period. And I don’t recommend that. Leaving anything behind there is also not recommended, as I doubt it would remain in orbit for very long, and anything left on the planet would likely end up like the shuttle fairly quickly."
"Okay. How's the data from Enterprise coming?"
"Searching now. The database was intact, but it contains centuries of data. I'll let you know when I find something."
"What can we tell about the center of the system?"
"The rotation point of the two primaries?"
"Yes."
"Nothing there as far as we can tell from out here. Nor would I expect anything to be there."
"What about a null point, like the Lagrange points between planets and their moons?"
"Very likely. But getting there might be problematical."
"What about the movement of the system through space?"
"You mean the expansion theory?" I nodded. "So you think as the system itself moves through space, expanding outwards with the rest of the universe, the line the null point makes as it moves could be used to fly up into the current null point?"
She nodded.
"Can we do it?"
"Why would you want to?"
I paused. I didn’t really have a reason.
Go there.
"Hell, I don’t know. But I've always wanted to. How about because Kali wants us to go there?"
We both looked at the end of the conference table, through the door inside my Ready Room. There was nothing wrong with it.
"Let me ponder how to go about it."
Pondering for Jane, was crunching numbers. I let her get on with it, and went back to my desk to continue on with emails and work.
A noise sometime later brought me out of my pad, and I looked up to see Annabelle seated opposite me, and over her shoulder, I could see the door was shut.
I raised an eyebrow.
"Jon, I need to retire. Before I start killing people."
"Huh?"
"I've done it three times now. I led my team into that trap on Pompeii. I was almost killed during the war, except for you forcing me to wear a better suit. And I gung-ho took my team into a suicidal situation I should have known better about. I've lost it."
"Which it is this?"
"The responsible leadership it. The meticulous planner who dots all the i's, and crosses all the t's."
"No plan survives contact with the enemy," I quoted.
"Especially when the plan shouldn’t have been followed in the first place."
I looked at her long and hard.
"General, the irony here is amazing."
"Irony?"
"Experience is calling itself inept in the presence of inexperience. Gung-ho? You can't get more gung-ho than I do, surely?"
"Oh. Maybe that’s the problem. You're rubbing off on me."
Laughter came through the coms from Jane. I didn’t laugh, and Annabelle's smile died.
"Explain to me how you blew it down there."
"The main factor was I listened too much to what my people wanted to do, and didn’t pay enough attention to how dangerous it really was. The twins really wanted to test out their bulldozer giant suits. Grace was so insistent we could get in and out safely in the Dropship. And part of me really wanted to save those people so bad, I ignored the risks."
"You were caught up in the whole rescue hype."
"Yes. And yes, I was thinking about it as something which could replace mercenary work."
"I know. I watched you."
"Why didn’t you try to dissuade me?"
"Because you needed to work it out for yourself."
"And you didn’t?"
I sighed.
"Let me put it this way. I've watched too much fiction where the hero's pull off a miracle at the last second, and they keep doing it show after show. Life isn’t like that. There's only so much luck to go around, and at some point, the odds will win, and the luck runs out. I've pushed my luck to the absolute limit already."
"So you didn’t want to be involved in the rescue because you think your luck is about to expire?"
"No. Of course not. Frankly, on this one I didn’t think I was needed. I also know in my gut, I'm not supposed to be the hero to the rescue. It happens as part of the nature of what we do, but it's not something to chase. I was happy to supply the resources, and let the rest of you figure out how."
"And we bit off more than we could chew."
"We all do."
"You don’t."
"Sure I do."
"I've not seen it so far. You've pushed the odds on occasion, but what you do always has purpose. You don’t leap into things without knowing what you're doing and why."
"But that’s also experience, of a different kind. Remember, I've been playing space combat and space colonization games since I was a kid. I've been killed thousands of times. I've changed the rules, and they still beat me. I modded the games, changed the basics to get around built in limitations, and they still beat me in the end."
"Which is partly why you're the Admiral here. You trained yourself in a way no-one else in thi
s time has been. Most of the military has been training in relative peace for a hundred years. No-one has the experience of dying repeatedly to give them the edge in thinking. Or very few anyway."
She'd thought of Miriam, who had also played computer games before becoming a fighter pilot. She was a good commander, in spite of her formal training.
"But that only goes so far."
"Further than you think. Why do you think so many people are wondering how you made so many ship advances where engineers have not even come close to them?"
"Game modding has its uses. When you turn a game upside down and change things, it gives you the perspective to look at what you see, and say 'Why is this limitation in place?' The answer is often because it's always been done that way, and I never accept that. The answer in games is often because the game maker didn’t want the player to be too powerful. In reality, it's because people get locked into narrow focus thinking, based on a set of assumptions which never get challenged. Fuck that. Survival is best achieved if you push everything to the limits and do everything better than everyone else. The trouble with engineers who haven’t been asked to do so for a hundred years, is they think it can't be done. Fortunately, I came across a good engineer who was delighted someone asked the questions to push the limits once again. The technology to do what I've done with ships has been around for a long time. All it needed was a free thinker who wasn’t afraid to ask how to do something different."
"And I'm glad you did, or we'd be dead."
"Perhaps not."
"Not? If you hadn't arrived on Pompeii when you did, we were dead. Ten minutes later, and we were toast. Without the faster speed you wanted, you'd have arrived several days after we died. Only you pushing the limits saved us."
"And I'm happy I was able to do so. And I will again."
"Again? I hope not. I'm getting too old for this shit."
"You are not old! You showed me that earlier."
"Maybe not in body, at least outwardly, but I'm slowing down. I told you before I needed to stop going in with the troops. But it's worse than that, I need to retire before I kill us all."
"I told you to find me a Colonel or one star, and I'll promote you to two stars."
"We haven’t come across anyone."
"Keep looking. For now, you're it."
She sat there and looked at me, serious faced.
"Jon, you are a complete enigma, you know that?"
"Huh?"
"I look at you and see a young man, deceptively green looking, and yet demonstrably competent. I listen to you, and I hear someone my own age, with decades of experience and wisdom. The two are confusing, at best."
"Old Soul," said Jane through the coms.
We both looked at where the words had come from.
"An ascended person can tap the experience of their past lives," Jane went on. "They come across as a know-it-all, and are often considered arrogant, and accused of thinking themselves superior."
"Not Jon," said Annabelle. "He might be tapping the experience, but we know he's not the 'superior' type. He may come across as a know-it-all at times, but he presents it well."
"So you believe in past lives?" I asked her.
"I didn’t once. And for a long time had no need to even think about such things. But then I met a spiritual person who threw a lot of my pre-conceptions out the window. I've been taking in the things you explained to people along this journey we're on, and quietly digging a little deeper. I can't say it makes much difference to me personally, but it does go a long way to explaining the team we have become."
"Gestalt," said Jane.
"What?" we both asked.
"Group creature. An organism which functions better as a group, than as individuals who make up the group."
I'd heard the term before, but had never thought about applying it to our situation. It fit though. I wondered what made Jane think of it. Now wasn’t the time to ask though.
Annabelle beat me to commenting.
"The group almost killed itself this time. That's not being better."
"But the group wasn’t complete this time," answered Jane.
I looked hard at Annabelle, who was nodding slowly.
"Do you want to leave us?" I asked her.
"Hell no. But I can't help thinking it's well past time I was either put out to pasture, or promoted past my ability to bugger up ops. If I hadn't gone mercenary, I'd either be a retired Colonel doing some consulting work for someone, or a two star doing desk work. Given my history though, I’d be out. That’s one reason there are not a lot of good Colonels or one stars around. The really good ones are completely out, because the established militaries couldn’t handle them, us. Or they're dead. I'm already dead, it's just taking me a while to lie down and stop. Mainly your fault by the way."
She smiled at me, and I wondered how someone like her could be ground down to this point. Why did it have to be this way for people who were extremely competent? What could I do to help?
The smile slowly died as I didn’t answer immediately.
"Okay," I said eventually. "Take yourself off the 'go in with the troops' roster. Supervise like a General is supposed to do. Take the strategic viewpoint, and overview other people's tactics. The only problem I see, is you're too close to your team these days, still acting as a Colonel. They swayed you to a course of action you otherwise would have seen too many holes in to approve. You also didn’t have your head on straight with this whole rescue thing. You need to take a big step back, and be a General, not a Colonel."
She nodded.
"If you need to," I went on, "pick the best team leader, and promote whoever it is."
"The twins are the best. But they don’t have enough time as Majors yet."
"Fine. Let's see how things go. If all we see are separate team actions, it doesn’t matter. When we get a mixed team op, we can give the twins the brevet promotion, and see how they do."
"And me?"
"You command. You supervise the team leaders. You supervise Dick, who supervises the stations police forces. If we ever need to combine the troops with station security, there should be some existing structure in place. When we find someone to command the troops on the ground, you supervise that person instead of the team leaders, and we get a definite command structure formalized."
"But…"
"Retirement is not an option General. You know what's coming."
She nodded.
"Semi-retirement then, like Dick has?"
"Sure, when you find a ground commander."
"Deal."
We shook on it.
Fifteen
"Found it!" announced Jane, as I was thinking about dinner.
"What?"
"The reason Enterprise failed so fast."
"Show me."
A tactical plot popped up, with a course line aimed at the center of the system, but failing to get there, before heading directly for the jump point.
"What am I seeing?"
"They attempted to reach the null point by the direct route from the planet we just left. The stresses were too great for their shields, which collapsed. They turned around immediately for the jump point, but getting out proved as bad as going in, and without shields, the ship was pounded and strained beyond its tolerance levels. It’s a miracle they got out of the system at all."
"So we shouldn’t even attempt it?"
"We have a number of advantages they didn’t."
"Such as?"
"For one, their shields were comparable to what Gunbus has. BigMother, as a combined ship cluster, all shields working as one, has several orders of magnitude better shields than they did. Don’t get me wrong, it's going to be a bumpy ride, but our shields should hold firm."
"For another?"
Jane added stress lines to the tactical plot. For most directions around the system, going into the null point meant crossing directly across the stress lines. However, the line Jane proposed we take, allowed us to go between the lines a
lot of the way. At least at a macro level.
I could see why a ship like Enterprise would be affected so much. A huge ship, bigger even than BigMother, crossing across the stress lines would have differing stress at different parts down the hull. It would almost be like giants trying to rip the front and back sections off the ship, while another was trying to twist off the flight pods.
For us, it would be more like a giant trying to squeeze a flat shape into a round one. But the triangle shape would work for us as well, making it harder for a stress line to get a grip on the whole length of the ship at any one time.
"Put you off yet?" asked Jane.
"No. But I guess I better make it a trip for volunteers only."
Over dinner I laid out what I wanted to do, and suggested anyone who didn’t want to take the risk could stay behind in some of the smaller ships. Annabelle and Lacey went off to talk to the marines and pilots, and came back with a zero drop out count. It was the same for those in the room. I think Grace had more of an idea than anyone about what we were going to do, but she kept her game face on, and I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. She wouldn’t meet my eye either, so she was probably still embarrassed about the afternoon.
I wasn’t in the mood for vids after dinner, and spent some time playing with Angel in my suite, after which I settled to re-read Hitch Hikers. It had been a few years, and while I wasn’t game to touch the paper versions Jane had given me for Christmas, the pad version was better anyway, which was why I used a pad when most people with top end PC's didn't. Angel settled on my knee, and I was soon chortling away to the dry British humour. There is something hilarious about not being able to get the hang of Thursdays, which I can't quite get a grip on.
"What's up chuckles?" asked Aline from the doorway.
I showed her the pad. She took it from me, laid it on the nearest table, and pulled me into the bedroom.
Later, with Angel curled up between our heads, I told her she could have dropped by the previous night.
"I did," she responded. "You were gone. So far gone I actually checked you for a pulse, and you didn’t notice. So I left you alone. I was up before you were anyway, albeit not by much. As much as I’d have liked the physical release, I don’t think either of us was up to it."
Hunter Legacy 8: Hero to the Rescue Page 9
