Hannah Sawyer (Kinsella Universe Book 3), page 25
Donna was silent for a few seconds. “I understand why we spent so much time at Caravalos. But here and now, I think we’ve trolled long enough. Return to your sections and head back to the barn. My section will wait an extra ten minutes and then do the same thing. See you at the debrief!”
Hannah headed back for the rest of her section, then back to the Rome, following the circuitous routes that they all cursed, but were absolutely necessary if they ever wanted to see home again.
It gave her a lot of time to think, and there was no one to comment on her overdoing things.
Two elements, Zodiac had suggested, to explore unknown systems. They’d modified that for the Master’s Game system, because it was a known spot of enemy activity, but that was still the base plan. Nearly forty other stars were being surveyed as she sat in her own fighter, by six fighters each.
Two things were chasing each other in her mind; experience said that if she followed them, something useful would result. Zodiac’s comment, “Eighteen missiles will put a powerful lot of hurt on someone.” That and what Captain Lemain had said about using statistical sampling to find their enemies.
They were checking every system, just like those first groups on Shenandoah had suggested, as the other ships sent on the same mission had, in fact, done. But Shenandoah hadn’t done that: instead, they had surveyed a much larger area with only a slight increase in mission time by cherry picking stars more likely to have earth-type planets.
She had the mission specs for the other squadrons on her computer; she looked at it. Six of those systems, and the Master’s Game system, should have been the ones to draw a full survey. Sure, once they found their enemies, they’d have to be much more thorough, but not before then. She grinned to herself. And the reason why Zodiac’s comment was there in her thinking? If eighteen missiles would ruin someone’s day, what would more than sixty do?
She leaned back, wishing she could rub her eyes. With sixty missiles it would be worth programming a third of them to look for an oxygen world and thump it. It wouldn’t be the total destruction their enemies preferred, but if those twenty-one missiles were Fleet standard nukes, they’d know they’d been thumped. And it might make a penetration later easier. Once again she pictured how it could be made to work. She shook her head. Maybe, God willing, Admiral Kinney would be satisfied with a good solid thump. Maybe, if those missiles got through in any number, the entire fighter wing could return and start bouncing rubble piles around with repeated nuclear strikes.
Bottom line: survey statistically significant systems with entire squadrons. The fighters would load a nuke and two ship killer lasers. She nodded to herself.
She remembered the words of the admiral who commanded at New Helgoland. “You will rue the day you started this war, from highest amongst you to the least!” Yeah, if you wanted someone ruing the day, they had to be alive. And they’d been wrong about the nightmares: she’d had nightmares since the war started; the new weapons hadn’t given her even one.
A dead planet was a dead planet. In a way, the weapon was a bad tactical ploy. It was a point failure source for an attack. At Gandalf the aliens had nearly a hundred ships. Lots of their ships and missiles had been destroyed before they could reach their targets or fire more missiles. The attack succeeded anyway because of so much redundancy. Sure, Turbine Jensen and four ships survived, and that was bad for the enemy, but their goal had been to kill the planet. Sure, they tried to kill anyone who tried to escape, but they had to know that at some point they would fail.
Redundancy, she thought. It’s about redundancy. Again she was unhappy that she couldn’t rub her temples. That always helped when she wanted to think more clearly.
When she was back aboard Rome, she checked with the controllers. She was last aboard, all of the others from her squadron had safely recovered. She gave a sigh of relief and headed for the debrief with only a quick stop in her compartment for a shower and change of shipsuit.
There wasn’t much to say; most of what was said was Zodiac and his discovery of the ram scoop. Hannah bounced out of her chair as soon as Donna declared the debrief complete.
Donna laughed. “You’re looking chipper. Where are you off to?”
“The mess,” Hannah told her truthfully.
“Ah yes, that’s on my list of stops. Right after a trip to the head and a long hot shower!”
Hannah grinned. She’d been there and done that! She gathered up a couple of sandwiches at the mess, then went to the study group’s conference room and made some calls.
She explained as she munched her sandwiches to Light Huygeens and Rachael Ferris about her thoughts.
Light Huygeens thumped his forehead with his palm. “I think this counts as a blonde moment! Duh! I was in that brief, too! The object is to locate an enemy-held system. Fine-tooth searches can come later! And yeah, a couple of dozen down-bound missiles are going to distract anyone!”
Rachael Ferris shook her head. “It’s always easy to beat yourself over the head when you miss something obvious.” She grimaced. “Sometimes, though, it’s easier to do than others. This was a goof on everyone’s part.”
Rachael looked at Hannah. “In a few minutes a call is going out for squadron leaders and ops officers. Your debrief was interesting; others were more so.”
“Did we make contact?” Hannah asked eagerly.
Rachael shook her head. “You’ll have to wait on the admiral’s pleasure, Hannah -- if pleasure is the right word for it.”
As if on cue, the PA system called the squadron officers to what was being called the “Board Room,” by the other pilots.
Hannah stuffed the last of a sandwich into her mouth and chewed on the way.
A few minutes later the hundred and fifty officers who worked in the squadrons were sitting in their chairs when Admiral Kinney came in.
She walked to the central podium and looked them over for a few minutes.
“There is no good way to tell you about what we’ve found. Let’s just say that up front: what you hear is going to severely depress our people. Don’t bother to try to put a smiley face on it, don’t express optimism or pessimism. Just tell it like it is and leave it at that.
“Near the Master’s Game system one of our more unusual pilots, a former Marine ammo shuttle pilot, got an idea. He pursued that idea through channels and came up roses.”
Behind her on the wall a picture flashed. It looked a little like an artist’s rendition of a black hole, except this one glowed blue. “This is a Bussard ram scoop, almost certainly the one sighted by Master’s Game. The part you can see is nearly eight thousand kilometers across. Note that it is functioning; that is, it’s gathering molecular hydrogen and we assume, tanking it. The ram scoop is currently slowing slightly, but is still traveling at about a hundred and forty thousand kilometers per second... a bit less than half the speed of light.
“Marine Lieutenant Zodiac’s evaluation is that the ram scoop and the ship Captain Drake detected in the Master’s Game system are going to rendezvous and the ship will tank from the ram scoop and then proceed at a significantly lower intrinsic velocity to some destination out towards the galactic rim, which is where their current course will take them.
“It would be unwise in the extreme to attempt an intercept; they may well need that fuel for their survival and if we spook them, they may take off without it.
“For you see, Occam’s Razor says we found some of their colonies. Two flights found systems that formerly contained earth-like planets. Both planets have been destroyed in the fashion we’ve come to know. One of those systems was destroyed about ten years ago, another within the last year.”
The star chart was flashed on the screen, showing the systems involved; no surprise, they were the ones furthest away from Adobe.
Hannah looked at the map, shaking her head. The numbers simply made no sense. None. A year? A year ago the enemy was blowing up human system after human system. What rational reason would you take on another opponent before you’d put the last one down, recovered, refitted and were ready to go again?
The last they’d heard, there had been no attacks for three months after New Cairo. That was simply insane. Humanity had taken a severe blow, but space-based industry was very quickly scaleable. And it had been. For the next few years production would go up by a factor of ten every year.
Billions of people were dead, but tens of billions still lived and it took only a few hundred people to crew a cruiser and just one to fly a fighter. Either could kill an enemy ship. That meant in five or ten years there might be a million Fleet ships and tens of millions of fighters. A million cruisers! And that would be, if the prewar ratios continued, about a billion people in Fleet Aloft, another billion and a half in the Port Arm. Marines? Probably a couple of million of them, too -- not that they’d been of much use in the war so far.
If the aliens couldn’t knock out humanity when humanity had barely a thousand ships, they were going to be in a world of hurt when that million ships and ten million fighters came calling! It was crazy! Simply crazy!
Something in the back of her head roused up and looked around. A single word popped into her thoughts. Schizophrenic. It was like they were schizos. It made no sense at all. Of course, human history was dotted with dictators and other monsters of the human variety who’d done things equally insane, killing millions, tens of millions of their fellows, usually thinking they could do it with impunity. And some had, of course, but lately humanity was pretty much fed up with that and stopped it early on. Humanity had learned its lessons. It had taken a while, but the grownups and the sane were now firmly in charge and had been for centuries.
The study groups were told to meet, to go over new plans. Hannah smiled at that. She’d been there and done that already, too! She stood up with the others.
“Hannah.” Hearing her named caused her to turn around and look at Ernie Sanchez. Captain Sanchez, now.
“Captain,” she said with a grin.
“Walk with me, Lieutenant.”
She did just that, following him to the bridge where he stood in front of a vast star chart.
“I have two questions for you,” he said as he stared at the map. “The first is simple. Were you scared on your mission?”
Hannah contemplated that. “Yes, I guess, sir. It’s different now. I’ve done things; I’m confident that I can do them as good as they can be done. But still... it’s mainly failure I think about now, not anything happening to me.”
He patted her shoulder. “Once upon a time I told you we got rid of people in the Fleet who weren’t physically afraid. I was much younger then.”
Less than a year, Hannah thought. But it had been a very, very long year.
Captain Sanchez went on, “You’re absolutely right. Once upon a time I was afraid for myself. Now -- I have all these people to look out for and I’m having to force myself to eat every time the fighters go out.”
Hannah nodded. How well she knew that!
“Admiral Kinney and I had a discussion a short while ago about what to do next. She wants one thing and I want another.
“I heard about your squadron-strength probe idea a bit ago. I’m impressed, deeply impressed. Goodness! How that idea has changed since those days of ‘spontaneous display of zeal.’”
Hannah blushed. “I guess I have to say that I’m mission oriented, sir.” Like Gloria had been. “I use whatever thinking I need to, inside or outside the box, to get where we need to go.”
“Well, aside from the fact we’re going to have two study groups looking into where to go, they will simply be checking our work. Look at this.”
A cluster of stars about sixty light years beyond where they currently were lit up. Then a second cluster, down a bit instead of straight ahead and seventy light years off. The second, the further, cluster was much larger than the first.
“Admiral Kinney wants to go to that far cluster. She is sure that’s a major enemy area. I want to go for the closer cluster.”
Hannah looked at the more distant cluster. “Is that an open cluster?”
Ernie shook his head. “No, according to the parallax measurements we’ve made over the years, it’s just a chance association. Not, mind you, that the orbits of those stars around the galaxy haven’t been significantly affected by their relative proximity to each other. But those stars are just a random grouping -- for all that there are a lot of F and G type stars there. Most of them are metal rich, I might add.”
Humanity had found that Crazy Ivan systems tended to be around metal-poor stars, and not infrequently, younger systems.
Hannah wasn’t wearing a bubble now, so she massaged her temples for a few seconds, thinking hard.
Finally she turned to her captain. “Captain Sanchez, it is my considered opinion that if we probe too far, no matter where Rome returns to normal space, we’ll be attacked almost at once. We have no idea how far away they can detect ships on High Fan. We think, mind you, just think, that a ship on High Fan can’t detect much except very close, but that range is probably wider for a ship in normal space. And we have no idea what ‘very close’ means in real terms.
“If I was busy blowing up other people’s planets, I’d be most concerned about the folks we’ve attacked bringing the war to my own doorstep. I would go out of my way to picket the likely approaches.
“I have no more desire to take this slow than anyone else. But if we rush this, one day Rome will drop from High Fan and about a minute later, before we get very many of our fighters aloft, all hell will pop.”
“Where would you go, then?” Ernie asked.
Hannah grinned. “Half way between where we are now and where you want to go. If we try for that further cluster, we’ll never see home again. Even the nearer one is going to be a significant risk. There are a few stars before there, I suggest we find a likely one and check it, fighters only.”
He grimaced. “I’ll take your ideas under advisement. Go get some rest, Hannah. We’re going to be on High Fan for a couple of weeks, no matter what. Study groups tomorrow!”
The choice of where to go next was easy to make, too easy, for Hannah’s taste. There were three stars in a group on the edge of the closer cluster, the edge facing Rome. All were strong possibilities to have earth-like planets.
Moreover, about a week or so of flight time away from the stellar trio, even considering radical course changes, was a brown dwarf. That would be their first destination.
Rome dropped from High Fan a light month system west and launched her protective screen of fighters.
With only three squadrons going on the mission, quite a lot of fighters were on the CAP -- the defensive patrol protecting Rome.
Second Squadron was one of the three full squadrons tasked to investigate the system and they emerged a full light week from their destination. Lynn Shapiro snapped some pictures from a large telescope that her fighter had been equipped with in lieu of a nuclear-tipped missile.
Lynn hadn’t been happy with the tasking; it had hurt Hannah to do it, but she was the logical choice. Lynn was an adequate pilot. Barely. A couple of times Hannah and Donna had debated asking for her relief, but that was a big step and Hannah never told Donna that the reason she’d never agreed was that Lynn reminded her of Gloria. Not so much physically, although there was a little of that too, but her general attitude.
The pictures were analyzed and moments later they dropped much closer to the unexplored system. Donna had Hannah make the decisions on who went where. Hannah had contemplated the green oxygen planet for a second, then had Donna drop from fans well above the star’s plane of the ecliptic with her element. Three elements under Jeff Flake would approach the inner gas giant, while Hannah and three elements would drop near the planet.
It was, she told herself, not that she was being brave. She’d put Donna where she had the best view of what was going on, Jeff in the spot least likely, she thought, to draw the heaviest response, and she, the least valuable member of the command team, would take the most risk at the planet.
They emerged six million kilometers from the planet, with Lynn one of the members of Hannah’s second element. Lynn turned her telescope on the planet, while everyone else was busy taking what instrument readings they could.
“No ship detections,” Hannah announced after a few seconds. Once again she cursed the limiting value of the speed of light, the puny nature of the instrumentation that fighters carried. What she wouldn’t give for a passive scan sat!
She laughed then and Lynn spoke. “What, boss?”
“Just wishing for the improbable. They are really going to hate me on...”
The universe turned inside out.
She’d have been blinded if she’d been in a cockpit, as it was her sensors were offline. “Report!” she called into her radio, not knowing what else to do.
“Zodiac, Hannah. I didn’t see a missile launch, but one has detonated. I think it was Celia that took the hit. I still have my scanners.” He paused. “You’re going to kill me, but I had them off.”
“Why?”
“In case of this.”
Hannah nodded to herself. From now on, some of the group were going to have to keep their scanners off.
“Celia was an element leader, Zodiac. Rackmahn? Massoud?”
There were no replies. A few moments later it was confirmed. In one second, three fighters were gone. No one had seen a missile launch, but would they have seen a missile on chemical burner cans? In theory their optical scanners could pick up that sort of missile, but evidently not.
“Spread out,” Hannah ordered. “Much wider separation. Back away from the planet.”
“Hannah,” Lynn said. “Before that burst fried the scope, I detected two surface installations. I have decent spectrographic results from the atmosphere. I...”
Another titanic explosion rippled through the area.
“Damn, damn, damn!” Zodiac said, angry. “I still didn’t detect a launch! My electronics are fried now, too.”
