Hannah Sawyer (Kinsella Universe Book 3), page 16
It was clear what had happened to Star Wind, considering what had nearly happened to the relief ship, six times. Chunks of debris in eccentric orbits, moving at relatively high velocities as they approached the gas giant, were common and extremely dangerous. The other major satellites were showing considerable impact damage, including one that had reformed a magma ocean on the surface.
Quite a few observations had been made before the relief ship departed. They filed a report saying that Star Wind had probably arrived well out from the system, hadn’t realized what they were seeing, and had jumped close and been the victim of debris. There were, Arif told them, all sorts of flags requesting data from any further missions; none were scheduled though, for at least a century, because that system was more than a hundred light years from Earth and would never be economically important.
Star Explorer had a much less clear result. The last system a beacon had been found in had a large gas giant, slightly inside the orbit of Jupiter in the Solar System. There was a Mars-sized planet a little closer to the star than Mars was at mankind’s home system, but it otherwise duplicated Mars quite closely. It was a desolate and lifeless planet.
The next system on the survey schedule was even more plebian. In lieu of Jupiter, although out at Saturn’s distance, there was a planet nearly four times Jupiter’s size. The rest of the system consisted of debris of various sizes; the next largest body was less than 800 kilometers in diameter. There were moons around the gas giant, but they had been battered repeatedly by collisions. No trace was found of Star Explorer, and after a few weeks of searching, the relief had returned home.
Star Explorer’s mission had occurred when the Federation was doing some deeper probes of the surrounding galaxy, and had been nearly a hundred and twenty light years from Earth when it was lost.
“Are there any other survey ships currently known to be in the area?” Hannah asked Arif.
He started to say something, then stopped. “I’m sorry, Hannah, Rachael. It never occurred to me to query the database. I was focused on the lost ships and the relief expeditions.”
“And that’s where my attention was focused too,” Alex growled, obviously angry with herself.
The map was called up, and a moment later, there was a single green dot. “That’s one of the systems Star Explorer surveyed,” Rachael stated. The computer coughed up the numbers. “And guess what, a planet that matches Earth to three places, and the planet is only in the equivalent of the late Permian period.”
Humanity, when it colonized a planet, remade it into something like home. Planets with anything that might look like it would evolve into something intelligent within a few million years were off limits, so planets where ferns and shell fish were the top of the ecological pyramid were prime real estate.
“The ship there is Master’s Game, a private survey ship, commanded by Colinda Drake of Sky Masters. Does anyone here not know who she is?” Rachael queried.
Arif reluctantly admitted he did not.
“Sky Masters does great big computer AIs. The ones that are aboard every ship of Fleet Aloft. Colinda Drake is the sole proprietor, the chief scientist, chief cook and bottle washer of the company. When was the last time Master’s Game was heard from and when can we next expect contact?”
The numbers weren’t good. Master’s Game was on a two-year mission. That was a lot longer than a Fleet Survey ship would be deployed, but civilians could write whatever they wanted into service contracts. They’d been out eight months, and weren’t due back for another sixteen.
Hannah was the first to notice that Rachael had stopped reporting and was simply reading what was on her computer screen. “Rachael?”
Rachael looked up after a second. “I sure hope none of you are alien spies! There is a huge intelligence flag on Master’s Game. Colinda Drake holds a reserve Captaincy in Fleet Aloft. I won’t go into the details, but let’s just say that Master’s Game could probably hold it’s own against most cruisers.”
“Not the new lasers, too?” Hannah asked, startled.
“What new lasers?” Rachael replied, her face looking innocent. All of them laughed -- by then the new lasers were common knowledge. Not to mention their effectiveness against the aliens.
“Hannah, contemplate what we could do, planning-wise, to explore, using Rome ala your suggestion, out at this system Master’s Game is reported to be at. You are authorized to use any assets aboard the ship you should require.” Hannah nodded.
On her way back to her quarters, Hannah was buttonholed by the Marine, Lieutenant Zodiac. He was, she found, extremely upset.
“Ma’am, I understand about your malf. I’m glad you are okay, but please...”
“Please what, Mongo?”
“It’s Zodiac, Lieutenant, Zodiac. My old man knew how to pick names. But, no offense, Lieutenant, my old lady didn’t. They won’t give me a check ride. ‘Later in the week, when we can work in the time.’” He was furious, Hannah saw. “I’m losing time, Lieutenant. Time I need to be working up with everyone else! I’m a Marine, Lieutenant! I need to learn how to play with others who aren’t Marines!”
Hannah nodded, turned right instead of left at the next corridor and took an elevator down. Zodiac stayed one step behind her.
It took a few minutes to get the flight logged and authorized and then she rode down the rail one more time. Nothing untoward happened. She flew with Zodiac out to the exercise area, where she put him through the paces. He was, she saw, a good pilot. He knew instinctively which way she would break; he anticipated likely threat vectors and reacted properly to simulated attacks along those vectors. Two hours later, they were back aboard Rome.
“I’ll take care of the paperwork, Zodiac. You’ll fly the regular training missions tomorrow,” she told him.
“Thank you, Lieutenant.”
Hannah left Donna a voice mail, grabbed a sandwich and went back to the conference room they been meeting in earlier. She called the map back up and focused on the area in question.
She’d been at it for an hour when there was a knock on the door. Surprised, she got up. None of the others would have bothered to knock.
It was Zodiac. “Came to see if you wanted to spend a little time at the club, Lieutenant. All work and no play, makes for very dull ops officers.”
“And you know how many ops officers?” Hannah asked.
“Just you and not all that well. I’d like to extend the baseline.” She saw his eyes focus behind her, on the star map over the table.
“What’s that?” he asked.
Hannah grinned. “Why, that’s homework, Zodiac. Surely you had homework?”
“I had, yes. However, I was already preparing for my career in the Marines. Teamwork is everything, when you’re a Marine. I had help with my homework, lots of help. And I helped out a few people, myself.”
No one, Hannah thought, had told her how classified the map or data was. It was all in the databases, Hannah thought. The Federation hadn’t been much into classifying things before the war. Even now, while the pendulum had swung far in the other direction, there hadn’t been any warnings. Warnings she was used to. All that was negative; on the other hand, Rachael had told her she could command any asset aboard Rome.
“Well, if you want to help... I’m working up an ops order for the entire Wing. That would normally take Commander Sanchez and his staff of seven the better part of the day. I need to be done in time to get some sleep tonight.”
“What do you have?”
They went over the data. Almost at once, Zodiac was chewing on the numbers. There were only fifty systems within a week of the system Master’s Game was at. Another three weeks further, where Star Explorer had been lost, there were forty stars within ten light years.
The problem, Hannah thought, was life support and equipment reliability. A week out and a week back was within the specs of a fighter. You’d return with about 20% of your life support and 22% of your fuel, which weren’t great margins, but could be done relatively safely. Losses would be at the one percent level she’d been so willing to accept earlier.
Two weeks out, two weeks back? You would have to carry an extra fuel tank; you’d have to use at least another missile’s worth of mass for consumables. And the odds would go from one percent to ten or twelve. Not odds that inspired any great desire to fly against.
Zodiac helped there. “No offense, Hannah, but when you’re out in the deep woods, with no one and nothing else around, it sure would be nice to have a Marine OU rifle, an RPG launcher and a back pack of rockets and a belly pack of OU magazines. The problem is, alone in the woods, you’re a lot better off worrying about what might be sneaking up on you, rather than thinking you are the top dog, king of the food chain. Maybe it would be better to have no missiles at all, Hannah. You want them to come back and report. Having nothing to shoot at the bad guys gives you a real incentive to come back as soon as you have something worthwhile to report.”
Hannah thought about that for a bit, then waved at the map. “Still, I’m uncomfortable with fighter missions that last a month. Two weeks is bad, really bad. A month? That’s like forever in this war. It means Rome has to be parked, more or less in the same place, for an entire month. The returning fighters aren’t going to be able to travel far for a secondary rendezvous. I don’t think Rome sitting still for a month is a good idea.”
“Not with this egg one of those in the basket!” Zodiac said with feeling. “Two weeks, yeah. That works much better.”
“I made some very positive statements the other day about how much territory we could explore with fighters. I’m going to get screwed with these numbers.”
“I heard about that! First, you punched a four-star admiral in the nose! Way to go! Not even Marines have balls for something like that! Then, I hear tell, you cussed out two five-star admirals and a bunch of other starry wonders. Hannah, Marines don’t do that sort of thing. Ask a thousand of us to take a hill and every last one of us will volunteer. Even if we know every last one of us will die, we’ll go up the hill and die trying to fulfill the mission.
“Ask for a Marine volunteer to tell a senior officer to do something implausible to himself... ah, Hannah, you couldn’t get one of that thousand to volunteer for the duty. Not a one. What we need to do here, Hannah, is to focus on this. Right or wrong, you got their attention. Our job is to make it work as good as it can work!”
He gestured at the map. “Suppose we find an enemy-held system. What can we expect? We’re pretty sure they can detect ships under High Fan. They will know we are coming, then. And what our course will be. Ships dropping from High Fan will stand a large percentage chance of being ambushed. That bites if you’re the pilot because the mission will be to return and report. Except you’re not likely to survive to do it.
“Even in systems they don’t hold, they will have pickets. We have people going out to picket systems near the Earth, even now. God! You think what that’s going to take, in terms of balls and materials and you have to wince!
“We aren’t going to surprise them. Which means, the fighters will come under attack. One at a time? Dog meat! Marines never do things one at a time. We send as many as we have available, so long as they won’t get in each other’s way. You want to explore fifty systems with what we’ve got? Send two elements to each system! That’s just three hundred fighters! The fighters drop with a full load of those big missiles you like! If they find themselves on the short end of the stick, they shoot their missiles off. Three, each. Eighteen of those babies are going to put some serious hurt on an enemy.
“And then, even if the pilots are all killed, their deaths won’t be in vain. A week and a day after they were supposed to drop into the system, if they haven’t come back, we’ll know for certain why they didn’t come back. Then we can put a big ‘hostile’ sign on that system, and return with a great many of our friends and send them to the fires of hell, where they’ve sent so many of us.”
With that, Hannah looked at the map with a new set of criteria. The mission planning was much simplified, and within an hour, they’d finished not just one operations order, but two.
“Please, oh mighty ops officer! Have mercy!” Zodiac had pleaded, as she looked over the map, contemplating the next location to park Rome.
“Some of us have duty later today, Lieutenant! Moreover, you’ve killed my chance at a shot of grog! At least let me go and have a shot at the pale imitation grog!”
It was, Hannah saw, after 0100 hours, past time and then some, to be in bed. She firmly said no to the officers club, and went and lay across the bed in her quarters, not bothering to undress.
In the morning she got a box of cinnamon rolls from the mess, some containers of juice and carried everything to the conference room.
Commander Ferris and Chief Vargas were already there; looking over the ops orders Hannah and Zodiac had generated the night before.
“I’m intrigued, Hannah,” Rachael told her. “I thought we might have an outline of an ops order to work from today. One full ops order would have been remarkable. Two? It defies reason and logic. What time did you knock off?”
“0100, Rachael. One of my squadron pilots helped out with a lot of the work. That and we just copied a lot of the data -- boiler plating them.”
Hannah regretted mentioning Zodiac almost the instant the words were out of her mouth. Because in that instant, Rachael had that gleam in her eye.
“How much did he help?” Alex asked Hannah.
“He’s a new pilot. He had some good ideas, though.”
“Going in guns blazing? That wasn’t what anyone was expecting,” Rachael observed. “If anything, the thinking was the other way around, sneaking in, quiet-like, then getting out unobserved. One or two fighters at a time, not six of them at once.”
“We thought about that, Rachael. He made the point that if they can detect ships on High Fan, we won’t be sneaking in. They will be waiting for a fighter as it comes off fan. Just one fighter means the pilot will be wasted, Commander. We couldn’t be sure when the pilot didn’t return if it was a malf or trouble... we’d have to go back to check. With two elements -- if they don’t come back, we’ll be certain why.”
“We weren’t going to be formal,” Rachael mildly admonished Hannah.
Then she added, “Please see that this pilot is detached to assist us, Hannah.”
“Commander, he’s a new pilot, he hasn’t had a chance to start working with the other pilots. He has to do that, Commander. He has to.” Or he was dead and likely someone else would be dead, too.
“Two hours in the morning, two hours in the afternoon, just like you, Hannah. His duty day just got longer is all.”
“Yes, Commander.”
“I understand you’re upset, Hannah, but we will be civil here. Now, you call Lieutenant Merriweather and see if you can round up this idea machine.”
“He’s a Marine, Rachael.”
Hannah was surprised when Rachael laughed. “The goal of this study group is to have the most disparate group of people we can mix. A Marine will fit in just fine, Hannah. Just fine.”
“A Marine?” Arif asked. “That will be unusual!”
Rachael nodded. “My point exactly, Arif.”
Hannah called Donna, who simply said, “Per your request, he’s flying. You can have him this afternoon.”
“Thanks, Donna,” Hannah told her.
“Hey, if you don’t find something for us to shoot at, all of the practice will be for nothing. We have more need right now of targets, than practice. Find us some targets! We’ll get enough practice before then!”
They went over the ops orders that Hannah and Zodiac had prepared, making few criticisms and fewer changes.
After a bit of that, Rachael called a short break where all attention was to be focused on the cinnamon rolls and juice. One of the things Alex said utterly fascinated Hannah.
Alex had lofted a roll, bowing slightly in Hannah’s direction. “These are good, Hannah! Yummy! Not a patch on ice cream, though!”
“Absolutely!” Rachael had agreed. “It’s amazing how sometimes the smallest things can motivate the greatest effort.”
“What do you mean?” Hannah asked.
“On Shenandoah, on their workup deployment, they managed to leave without any ice cream,” Rachael told Hannah. “They had none on the ship. Zero. No way of making any. Within a week, people were depressed and upset about the loss of something most of them didn’t indulge in that often.” Rachael thumped her stomach. “I surely can’t afford it!”
Both Alex and Hannah had laughed, Arif smiled, not really understanding a woman’s eternal battle with the bulges.
“When we headed out for the survey, Captain Lemain offered up extra ice cream as a reward for extraordinary performance,” Alex told them. “For some, like Rachael, it didn’t make sense at first, but by the end of the deployment, oh, my! There wasn’t any mountain we wouldn’t move to get an extra ration!”
Alex smiled in Rachael’s direction. “That’s when I hitched my star to Rachael’s. Gosh, did we ever make out like bandits! Five times, more than any other group, we got extra ice cream!”
Hannah nodded, remembering some of the things Zodiac had said the previous evening. “Zodiac, the pilot who helped with the ops orders, talked a lot about what motivates Marines. Duty, sense of honor, brotherhood. He also said that no matter what the motivation, you couldn’t get a Marine to speak up in front of a flag officer.”
Rachael thumped the table. “So long as we have you, Hannah, we’ll be covered in that department too!”
Hannah spent the rest of the morning and the early afternoon in her own office, working on the squadron training schedules, reading the write-ups the element leaders were generating about the pilots in their elements, and what the element pilots were writing about their leadership.
