Hannah Sawyer (Kinsella Universe Book 3), page 31
For the first time that Hannah could remember, Gloria spoke to her in one the dreams. “That’s who they are, Hannah. This isn’t us.”
Hannah almost flew out of her bunk, as if she’d been shocked or found she was sharing her bunk with a big fat bug of some sort.
There was no more chance of further sleep. Over and over, all afternoon and night long, two images alternated in her mind, like a semaphore. Light Huygeens saying, “I would be far happier to see a picture of an alien planet blowing up, than a picture of one of their smiling faces.” And Gloria saying, “This isn’t us.”
And long before morning, she realized that there was no one on Rome who wanted to hear about alternatives. After all, the feeling was that just in and out, quickly destroying their target, was terribly dangerous. If there was no way to do it directly, Hannah vowed that she would do it tangentially.
She was up early and found Zodiac panting in the gym, part of a group of a half dozen Marines who were also breathing hard. “Self defense, Marine-style,” he told her.
He looked at her speculatively. “I don’t suppose you’d like to have a go yourself? The Fleet chiefs are something wicked when it comes to poker, and I could use some money. We could bet...”
Hannah smiled. “I could only find four the first time willing to bet against you, Zodiac. Now, I’m afraid, they know. You’d find the odds heavily against you.”
“A Marine can always hope! Besides, they’d have laughed at me, because I’d have been betting on you.”
“I have a question for you.”
“Fire away, Lieutenant!”
“How familiar are you with the Marine War Plans?”
He laughed. “War plans? I’m a shuttle pilot by training, remember? Right now Marines just die; why do you think I volunteered for fighters?” He waved at the other Marines standing around the gym. “Why do you think they don’t spit on me?”
“I don’t understand,” Hannah told him.
“Do you know what Marines have done so far, to aid the war effort?”
She shook her head, because she didn’t want to say she had no idea. She’d heard absolutely zero about the Marine’s war effort.
“Zero. Well, almost zero. A half dozen Marines on Willow Wolf’s first ship assisted her installing a Blue aboard a freighter. Other than that, our contribution is being a ship’s police force... and when the ship dies, they die. Sixty-one thousand, four hundred and nine Marines are dead so far, and except for those six -- and me -- we’ve had no hand in the war effort.”
“That’s monstrous,” Hannah said without thinking.
“Do you think I’d be flying a fighter if it wasn’t?” he asked. It wasn’t a rhetorical question.
“Hannah, I’m a Fleet Marine. I’m an Ozark Marine! That means I’m one of the proudest bunch of men in the universe, one who belongs to the finest organization in the universe! I don’t want to be wasted, like the rest of my brother Marines!”
He gestured at the other Marines. “We prize teamwork and comradeship, Hannah. Normally a Marine going off on his own is frowned on. I snuck it past them, Hannah. And after me, there will be no more Marine fighter pilots, at least not for a while, because the brass decided that they need shuttle-qualified Marine pilots and because if they’d not stopped them then, all my mates would have joined me.”
Hannah wanted to cry. “Admiral Kinney said it. If we win, none of the deaths will be a waste.”
“That, Hannah, is a load of crap.”
Hannah recoiled. Gloria’s death wasn’t a load of crap and she was personally going to make sure that it wasn’t a waste!
“I was,” she said, trying to keep her dignity, “specifically talking about pre-war plans on what to do if there was ever a planet-wide insurrection against the Federation.”
He shook his head. “Hannah, something like that would be most secret; like I said, until the war started, I was a shuttle pilot who flew ammo down from orbit. A cog in the one of the many wheels that the Fleet had at the ready. Maybe Colonel Leopold, the man who commands the Marine detachment aboard Rome, knows something about it, but I doubt it.”
Hannah started leaking tears, which seemed to confuse Zodiac. “I’m here, pissed as hell, and you’re crying. What’s wrong with this picture?”
“I didn’t mean to upset you. I was just thinking that until you mentioned his name I couldn’t remember his name. The Marine CO. He’s never, ever, been invited to any planning meeting that I know of.”
“He’s a Marine, Hannah. You want someone to take an objective -- he’s your man. So are the rest of us -- ready to do whatever it takes. You know, just like you and the rest of the pilots.” He waved around the gym, then pointed to one of the other Marines. “Sergeant, report to Lieutenant Sawyer!”
The man blinked, then straightened and saluted. “Sergeant Webster, William L.” The salute and everything else about Sergeant Webster could have been included in a textbook on drill. Hannah remembered her first exposure to that textbook and grimaced. She’d never looked this good, and he was only wearing sweats.
“Thank you, Sergeant!” Zodiac told the man.
The sergeant grinned. “She told you to go suck up a rope, right? Tell you what, Lieutenant... you offer to fight her again and I can get fifty guys here in half an hour to watch. Maybe you can get one to bet on you, but I’d bet not.”
Zodiac winced. “She took me by surprise, Sergeant.”
“Sure, surprise. You said you were going to teach her unarmed combat, standing right in front of her. Then you were on your back and seeing stars. Yeah, I can see where that might be a surprise, Lieutenant.”
“Well, I’ll not intrude further, Sergeant. Or provide any more fodder for Lieutenant Sawyer to beat up on.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant!” The sergeant tossed Zodiac a half wave, then formally saluted Hannah again, then returned to the other Marines who, a second later, started sniggering.
“I’m not sure why it never goes like they teach in OCS,” Zodiac said sadly. “They salute you like they mean it, and they wave at me. I had to ask the Gunny why, Hannah.” He paused, searching her face. “Do you want to know why they do that?”
Hannah shook her head, “No, but I have this feeling I’m going to find out.”
“Aside from the fact that Marines admire tall women, you remind a couple of them of Willow Wolf.” He lowered his voice. “Our Gunny is Master Gunner Cecil Howe. He was on Starfarer’s Dream with Commander Wolf.”
“Commander?” Hannah asked. “I thought she was a lieutenant commander?”
Zodiac shook his head. “No, but it’s complicated. Gunny Howe got the word while we were at Adobe. The Federation finally got around to giving her the Federation Star, but BuPers wasn’t about to let her be a lieutenant commander with less than a year’s service.
“But they made Captain Travers a rear admiral and that promotion was within his promotion authority... so he promoted her, then brevetted her to full commander.”
“And I remind them of her? Because I’m tall?”
“Well, that, too. That and you go down the rail as often as you can. That and you’re willing to sass anyone at all to get the job done right. Marines might never want to do that themselves, Hannah, but they surely admire those with courage to do it.”
“Zodiac, I keep thinking about what Light said in the meeting. About how he’d rather see a picture of us busting one of their planets, rather than a picture of one of them.
“One of the things that was enshrined in the basic documents of the Federation was that the Federation reserved the right to kill individuals for who they were and what they had done. And proscribed with the most dreadful penalties anyone who kills people for what they are.”
“They teach that in school,” Zodiac replied, looking at her curiously.
“Yes, they do. And what is our mission, Zodiac? We’re going to execute a planet full of aliens for what they are.”
She turned and walked away without another word.
Chapter 14
Hannah was sitting in her office shortly after her very perplexing conversation with Zodiac when the message chime on her comp went off. She looked at the clock; 0800 on the dot!
She remembered several discussions she’d had in her career so far about courage and bravery. Now, she was going to need to use everything she had, to fit in wherever it was they were going to send her.
It was right there at the top and she read it, surprised and pleased. Second Squadron: Lieutenant Commander Donna Merriweather, acting in command, seconded to Wing Staff. First Lieutenant Joshua Marlar, the new Exec, First Lieutenant Hannah Sawyer, operations officer. Then the list of names with new personnel flagged. Lynn Shapiro’s entry was almost funny. The thirty-day disabled list? That was new! And she was the twenty-second pilot assigned to the squadron, something Hannah very quickly found was unique.
They had not broken up any full squadrons and as a result there were only a few new squadron commanders and only the one new executive officer. There were in fact, several execs who’d been given operations officer hats, and even so, there were several new ops officers.
There followed a couple of weeks where Hannah spent most of her time in squadron simulations, practicing with everyone else, plus an hour or two a day working with the study group on plans and options.
Rachael Ferris had told Hannah late on the first day that the Chief Engineer and the Maintenance Department head were very upset with their study group. Commander Ferris had requested that they construct a robotic probe that could land on the planet that had been destroyed and could survive long enough to see if there was any information to be gleaned from it.
Hannah doubted the utility, but understood it was something that should be done. Any damage done by a forty megaton Fleet nuke was going to be swamped by even one gigaton bomb burst. After hundreds of them -- all they would see was smoke and fire. But even the faint possibility of information about their enemies was worth the cost.
Then came the day. Rome went off fans a half light year away from the system, without having detected any enemy fan signatures. The twenty squadrons of fighters detached for the attack flew separately and took up positions in the system. Rachael Ferris’ robot probe returned temperature and atmospheric data for a short while, then crashed, never having seen the surface.
“Too much smoke and dust,” Rachael said sadly. She and her team were snuggled up against a kilometer-sized rock orbiting in the inner system and made like bumps on a log. They weren’t to take part in the battle, but to wait until the others started returning to Rome before going home themselves.
There was, as far as Hannah was concerned, a virtual certainty that the enemy would emerge from fans in one of their predetermined locations to pick up their messages, telling them where the watchers thought the fighters were. Hannah wished them luck.
They’d made a decent map of the system their first time there, now they refined it. For the next two hours every thirty minutes each fighter would blip their fans for an instant, and then shaped an inert course to another rock.
It was almost certainly not as effective as Hannah’s trick against Donna, Zodiac and Lynn, if it was true they couldn’t detect gravity wells but could detect fans. On the other hand, the blips were very short and very well timed.
The massive computer aboard Rome had trouble with the problem in the simulations. All they could do now was hope.
Sure enough, for a little more than an hour she tracked the enemy fleet as it approached the system. Rome had deployed two latch frame buoys as soon as they arrived and in the intervening four hours the buoys had provided FTL communications across the inner system for the humans.
The alien fleet dropped from fans well out in the outer system, then split apart and then went to fans again, emerging in the asteroid belt. It was, Hannah thought, a truly target rich environment. Two ships were within blue range of the rock she was orbiting. And those ships were neither fighters nor decoys -- they were cruisers. And a fraction of a second later, they were clouds of expanding plasma.
Then the battle became a swirl. She went to High Fan, heading for the thirty ships separate from the rest. She’d gone half the distance when two missiles started tracking her, coming in from her targets. She smiled to herself. If she lived, she was going to get some good intelligence on how fast those missiles could change course on High Fan!
The answer was they were slow and clumsy and after that, she ignored them.
More missiles were fired as she approached. She deliberately flew through the center of the formation, stopped for a fraction of a second at a range of a half light second from the group then went to fans again.
That fraction of a second had allowed her passive sensors to see the nearest cluster of ships and a second later she stopped again, across the formation and fired her last blue at the biggest target she’d spotted.
She went right to High Fan and had the satisfaction of seeing her target abruptly vanish from her display. Now, though, she had a problem. There were about a dozen missiles that had stayed with her, obviously tracking her.
Hannah almost laughed and dropped from fan again, reoriented almost at once and headed for a gas giant. The alien missiles could track and reorient at least once, but they needed about three seconds to do so. She could tell the computer where she wanted to go while on High Fan, the computer would set the course and she’d set the time on High Fan.
What, she thought, would their little missile brains make of the gas giant?
She came off fans outside the gas giant’s fan well... about a second’s flight time. The enemy missiles flew on for a second and died in the fan well of the gas giant. Hannah had done her sums correctly and her intrinsic velocity took her away from the planet. An alien ship was evaluated as threat, but it was ten seconds away from being more than a potential threat, even though it stayed in pursuit.
Hannah had long since oriented her fighter for her meet point and went to High Fan.
The ship followed her almost a half light year, before dropping from High Fan. Hannah went the two light years to the meet point. There were a ten Second Squadron pilots already there, including Donna.
“Hannah, how did you do?” Donna asked as soon as they were close.
“I hit two cruiser class vessels, there’s no doubt what they were; they were pretty close. Then I went against that formation of thirty and took out one of the six large ships. I have no idea what it was. Piece of cake.”
“To say that battle was intense,” Donna told her, “is a big understatement! And you didn’t even notice?”
“No. One of the two cruisers was about a quarter million kilometers away in one direction, and the other about a half million in the other. Blue ranges. I took them, then went for the big one. What do you mean, intense?”
One of the new pilots laughed. “Intense? My fighter says I exceeded its human waste processing limits for two and a half minutes.”
“Captain Bachman,” Donna interjected, “was flat out wrong about dog fights. But that’s because she never thought about dog fighting on High Fan. Jeez, their missiles follow you!”
“They take a couple of seconds to reorient, once they’re past you,” Hannah said, trying to show she understood.
“And how many did you have chasing you?” Donna asked.
“I think it was thirty-two,” Hannah told her.
There was a moment’s silence, then another voice said, “I’m detecting another fan source coming towards us.”
“Hannah, let’s just say it’s a little sporty with those missiles chasing you. You made it just at the time I told everyone that we would fire on anything else coming at us.”
“Oh,” Hannah said, laughing. “Does anyone have something to shoot? I’d like to ream them something new.”
“Okay, we were set to run,” Donna said. “We’re going to need a new way to do meet points. Those missiles are hell, Hannah. Absolute hell.”
“What do you want to do about the new target?” Hannah asked.
“We get to full combat separation, blip the fans and hope we have an intrinsic great enough to take us away from the burst if it’s a missile.”
Hannah nodded. “Okay, we should split then.”
“Yeah, take care girl! I had two of them after me, and I too have brown drawers. The only reason I’m alive is they dropped off after four light months. Hannah, we lost most of the squadron again.”
Hannah leaned backwards, resting her head against the rest. Then she did what she had to do.
The target was Zodiac, a very excited and exuberant Zodiac.
“Hannah girl! You are the cat’s meow! The cream of the crop! Wow, and wow ten times over!”
“What, Zodiac?” Donna asked.
“I saw her go for the big guys. There was no one close to me, so I watched her. Watched her knock one of them down. It struck me then: I could do that too! So I did. Three of the biggies! I got them! Then I did like Hannah did -- I scraped the fleas off on a handy gas giant.”
He was so excited, it was hard not to be excited with him. “The Marines are on the scoreboard! Lord God! There were times I never thought we’d make it! This is the greatest day for the Federation Marines since we started this damned war!”
* * *
It took a day to return to Rome. The debriefs were more intense than usual, then they were called back to do it again, this time with their sensor logs as well.
Hannah was of two minds about Zodiac’s excitement. Yes, he’d knocked down three of the very large enemy targets. Maybe they’d just been supply ships or tankers or something, but they were large and had been well-protected. But, of twenty-one pilots from Second Squadron that had flown into the attack, only twelve returned.
Hannah was called to a meeting in the Board Room. At first, it was Rachael Ferris who spoke. “Historically, fighter pilots were -- overly optimistic -- about the results of their combat. This led to gun sight cameras, telemetry and a host of other improvements so we poor intelligence officers could accurately sort out what’s going on.
