Cody's War: Flight Of The Phoenix, page 13
“That’s eight,” Tilly said. She turned to Gail in alarm. “That means ‘wait.’”
“Huh?”
“It was a code they used,” Tilly said. “Eight’s the number I remember because it rhymes with wait.”
“What does it mean?” Gail asked.
Tilly gave her a look. “It means wait.”
“Well, it’s over two years old,” Gail replied. She turned back to Captain Murray. “Let’s send… Trident out to have a look.”
“Getting mighty thin on screen, Admiral,” Imbka noted.
“Can’t be helped,” Gail replied. “Let’s see if we can find out what we were supposed to wait for.” She paused and added, “And let’s send off a sitrep to the fleet.”
“Yes, miz,” Captain Murray replied.
#
“Okay, so what do we have?” Gail asked as she met Murray and Watney in her flag bridge two hours later. Tilly was lying with her head on the conference room table, dozing lightly.
“We’ve got eight beacons, we’ve recovered them all,” Captain Watney reported. “They’re from the Farmingham. We’ve managed to decode their messages and… we’ve got good reads on the ships Captain Evans encountered.”
“We’ve also identified debris which matches parts of the Farmingham,” Captain Murray added. He gave Gail a grim look. “From what we can tell, she exploded from a hull breech. We’ve got signs of laser strikes in the remains.”
“So we think they got the drop on her and sliced her up,” Gail surmised. The other two nodded. “Any sign that Evans escaped?”
The two captains shook their heads. “We can’t be sure. There’s a missing shuttle and there are missing suits but —”
“They might have been taken by the Thrakzz,” Gail concluded. Neither Tilly nor any of her family had seen their captors — the aliens were more than careful to keep out of sight. But they’d communicated their demands and from those interactions, Tilly had come to think that they called themselves the Thrakzz. Gail thought that they communicated similarly to crickets — by vibrating one part of their body against another, so they spoke in buzzy tones.
“From the beacons, we know that Framingham was out of warp when she was captured,” Captain Murray added.
“Why?” Gail asked.
“They laid a trap,” Tilly said, lifting her head up. “They laid —”
“Contact! Multiple contacts!” Came the shout from the bridge. “Captain to the bridge!”
“Just like now,” Tilly concluded miserably.
“Come on!” Gail shouted, racing out of the flag bridge right behind Captain Murray.
#
“Get a sitrep off to Admiral Ford, now!” Gail shouted as she exited the lift to the bridge. “Get Atlas and tell them to —”
“I’ve got Captain Yashenko, Admiral,” Natty Langford informed her.
“Put me on!” Gail said. “Yuri, they’re going to use lasers.”
“Right,” Captain Yashenko replied.
“This was a trap,” Gail said. “These are their spy craft.”
“Oh, we’ve got to get one of them!” Yuri replied.
“And not dead,” Gail told him. She punched her comm. “Colonel Martin, can you capture one of these bastards?”
“We’ll try,” Colonel Martin replied. “I’m re-routing our shuttles and launching our spares.”
“Launch them all!” Gail ordered. “They’re using —”
“Lasers, yes we know,” Colonel Martin replied. “Martin out.”
“If we leave everything, how soon can we get into warp?” Gail said to Captain Murray.
“Ten minutes,” Murray replied. “But we won’t have to recover —”
“I know,” Gail said, her heart sinking. She’d have to leave the marines. “But we’re the prize.”
“Yes,” Murray agreed. “Engineering, initiate warp sequencing.”
“Ma’am, we’ve got shuttles departing!” Bill Thomson, the engineering chief replied.
“I know, I sent them,” Gail replied. “Follow orders, commander.”
There was a pause. “Aye, Admiral.”
Gail switched comms. “Martin, I’m going to leave you. I’ll come back as soon as I can.”
There was a pause. “Yes,” Colonel Martin said. “They want you. We’ll make them pay.”
“Do that,” Gail said. She turned to Captain Murray. “Get us out of here.” Then she turned to Langford on comms. “Contact Trident, get them back here.”
“And Bee?” Captain Murray asked.
Gail’s eyes narrowed in thought then she shook her head. “How did they find us? How come we didn’t find them?”
“They were hidden, lying doggo,” Tilly said. “We didn’t see them until it was too late.”
“And how long were they there?” Gail persisted, glancing to Captain Murray. “Imbka, what if they’re robots?”
Captain Imbka considered that for a moment and nodded. “Could be,” she said. A light flashed on her screen. “Ready for Warp.”
“Get us out of here, Warp One,” Gail ordered. Captain Murray raised her eyebrows. “We’re going to circle back and come in on their tails.”
“We’ve got them localized now, Admiral,” Natty Langford reported.
“Okay, so if we come in with the lance…” Gail suggested.
“I’d recommend dropping out of warp and using our lasers,” Langford replied. “The lance… well, it’d make a mess, miz, and I don’t think you want that.”
“Very well, do we have enough lasers?” Gail asked.
“With Atlas? Certainly!”
“Tell them what we’re doing and let’s get it done,” Gail said.
Thirty minutes later, they re-entered normal space. Their lasers spat out four times. Atlas fired three more times and then the marines descended on the last ship.
“Martin! Clear away, she’s going to self-” Gail called. She was too late. A brilliant flash illuminated a spot in front of them.
“We’re clear, Admiral,” Colonel Martin replied a moment later. “We’re going to try —”
“Give them eight minutes,” Gail said. “Then check out the ones that haven’t exploded.”
“Very well,” Colonel Martin replied. “Why eight minutes, may I ask?”
“Just a hunch,” Gail said, glancing to Tilly. Tilly gave her a baffled look then said, “Why not eight hours?”
Gail shrugged. “An awfully long time to countdown.”
“So the beacons, they were timers?” Tilly asked.
“Maybe,” Gail replied. “We’ll know in eight minutes.”
Eight minutes later, only two of the alien ships remained.
“Permission to board, admiral?” Colonel Martin said.
“Don’t die,” Gail replied.
Martin laughed. “And where’s the fun in that?”
Chapter Nine
“We pretty much sliced and diced them,” Colonel Martin explained as he met with Gail and the others in the flag bridge two hours later. “We figure that’s why they didn’t self-destruct.”
The two robotic ships, labeled Alpha and Beta, had been sliced into six and eight sections respectively.
“Tracing back on our other intercepts, we believe that in these two cases, we severed the control runs on Alpha and sliced Beta’s computers in half. That’s why neither detonated,” Captain Watney reported. “Our techs are seeing what else we can but… we don’t want to wire power back into Alpha in case she destructs and we’re not sure we can get Beta’s computers back online.”
Gail nodded. “They’re inert, right?”
“We pulled all power sources, and disabled any batteries we could identify,” Colonel Martin reported.
“What else have we learned?” Captain Murray asked.
“Well, we haven’t discovered any rare or unknown materials,” Tanya Watney replied. “Pretty much standard metallurgy, standard construction.”
“There are only so many ways to build a ship, then,” Captain Murray concluded.
“How long were they waiting?” Gail said.
“We can’t be certain,” Captain Watney replied. “At a guess, they were left when the aliens took Farmingham.”
“Did they send off any communications?” Gail asked. “Any alerts?”
They all shook their heads. “The first we knew about them was when they came on line,” Murray reminded her. “And… as far as we can tell, they sent no signals.”
“So either they sent a signal we didn’t notice or… they were just traps,” Gail concluded. She glanced around, inviting opinions.
“Traps,” Colonel Martin elected. “Although why… I don’t know.”
“I do,” Tilly said. The others looked at her. “To get us. Anyone who came looking, to get them. So that they couldn’t raise an alarm.”
Gail considered it, Captain Murray met her eyes and shrugged.
“Aliens are weird,” Captain Watney concluded.
“Send in bots first,” Gail said. “No one goes inside until we’re ninety percent certain it’s safe.”
Colonel Martin started to protest but Gail cut him off. “I’d rather lose information than people.”
Colonel Martin let out his breath in a sigh. He nodded. “Very well, Admiral.”
#
Two hours later there were two explosions and the last of the alien robot scout ships were gone.
“You were right, Miz,” Colonel Murray said. “They had some pretty sophisticated algorithms, the minute the bots applied power — boom!”
“What did we get?” Gail asked.
“Not enough,” Colonel Murray said, shaking his head. “We have the general layout and schematics, a partial analysis of control and power runs but nothing from inside of their computers.”
“Relay all that you’ve got off to Commodore Marks, maybe she’ll get luckier,” Gail said. Danielle Marks and her division were due to drop out of warp in the next two hours near the second possible target — the missing ship Caldecott.
“Already done, Admiral,” Captain Murray told her. “Do we go after them?”
“Let’s hold in readiness,” Gail said. “I’ll be on my flag bridge.” She rose from her seat by comms and headed to the lift, trailed by Tilly Mayhew.
In the flag bridge, she opened a tach comm link back to Cody and brought him up to date.
“Robotic scouts, eh?” Cody said. “You know —”
“Two can play at that game,” he and Gail finished in chorus.
“Already working on it,” Tilly added, pointing to a holo where she’d sketched an initial design. “We could put dummies on them.”
“Which means that they’re not much more than sophisticated missiles,” Cody said.
“Very sophisticated missiles, they’ve got to select their own targets,” Gail said.
“They’ll need more than dummies, then,” Tilly said. “I volunteer.”
“What?” Cody barked in surprise. “Tilly, you’re too valuable —”
“And too you,” Gail added, smiling at the older girl.
“A copy of me,” Tilly said. “Copies.” Gail shot her a surprised look. “I’ve been tortured, I owe them.”
“No copy of anyone without their informed consent,” Cody said. “And no suicides.”
Tilly started to protest,
“It sends the wrong signal,” Gail told her. “And, it sets up a poor mindset.”
Tilly frowned in confusion.
“If you’re planning on dying, you’re not planning on coming back with the intel,” Gail explained.
“But one thing I could do — as a copy — is test our warp limits,” Tilly said.
“And see how small a warp bubble you can make,” Cody added. “Also, when are you going to let us know how to make those warp suits?”
“Those were hard,” Tilly said. “And father knew most of the math.”
“Once done, it can be done again,” Ellaz Whirly spoke up over Cody’s link. “If you can’t —”
“I’ll get with Ellaz Eber,” Tilly said. “She and I and I —” virtual Tilly “— will see what we can do.”
“That means spreading yourself too thin,” Gail said with a disapproving look. “Cody, which is more important, the scouts or the suits?”
“Scouts we can do here,” Cody said. “Tilly, why don’t you work on the warp suits?”
“I can send you the preliminary designs for the scouts by the end of today,” Tilly declared. “Then we can start on the warp suits.”
“And the energy guns?” Cody asked. “Gail told me about them.”
“I’d rather not,” Tilly said. “I mean, I’ll tell you what I know but… the math was iffy and the gun only worked the once.”
“Did it jam?”
“It burnt out,” Tilly said. “Literally. It melted in my hands. I threw it down as soon as I got back.”
“That explains your burns, then,” Cody said.
“Yeah,” Tilly agreed. “Hurt less than when they broke my legs the third time.”
“Sorry,” Cody said. “Okay, Gail, don’t let Danielle dawdle too much, we’ve got more interesting things to do.”
“Okay,” Gail said. “Mighty out.”
Tilly spent a few more minutes working on the scout design before turning to Gail. “Are you really going to do that?”
“Do what?” Gail said, idly playing with her displays.
“Not dawdle,” Tilly said.
Gail smiled at her. “What do you think?”
“Oh, good!” Tilly said happily. “I’d love it if we could get their computers.”
Gail’s expression fell as she added, “What if they’re using virtual people — virtual aliens — too?”
#
“I say again, this is Commodore Emma Forster, you will stand down your ships or you will be boarded,” Emma said fiercely. She’d been thrilled to meet up with Admiral Anderson. His ships had resupplied hers and were now traveling just slightly behind to lend a show of force. They’d agreed that Emma would “sort the assholes in space” out and then Ambassador Higgins would offer his services to the “poor, benighted Perkies.”
“And I say again, we will not tolerate threats in Perky space,” A gruff male voice replied. “I have three warships. Think carefully.”
“I have twelve,” Emma replied, smirking. “And we all have combat experience. Against alien ships.”
“I don’t believe you,” the gruff man said.
“We’ve provided you with certified vids, if you can’t believe them, you have a processing deficit,” Emma replied. “Now, we are here to issue a warning —”
“You’re pirates!”
“— a warning that your planet, your system, is in danger,” Emma continued implacably. “We are asking you to relay this information, we’re offering —”
“Who are you?” A new voice demanded. “How dare you interfere in the works of the Exalted?”
“Commodore Emma Forster,” Emma replied.
“All hail the Eminence of the Exalted!” the gruff male voice intoned.
Emma cut her comm and turned to her communications officer, Simone Manning. “Does anyone know more about this Exalted?”
“We’ve been monitoring, we believe this is a recent development — a matter of weeks,” Lieutenant Manning said. “Apparently she’s been around for five or six years but recently managed a coup. Before that, she was Marsha O’Neill from one of the southern continents. She’s only twenty-six.”
“She’s selling herself as a new messiah, come to cleanse the system of unbelievers,” Captain Walcott added. “It’s pretty weird down there, right now.”
“Oh, joy!” Emma said. She nodded to Manning. “Put me back on.”
“Exalted, I am Commodore Emma Forster of the Ford Fleet,” Emma said. “We are here with a warning. Your system is in danger of alien attack.”
“No, this is not possible,” the woman replied. “I forbid it.”
“Okay,” Emma said, shaking her head. She signaled Manning to cut the comm again. “Get me the ambassador.”
“You’re on,” Simone told her.
“Alvar?” Emma said.
“I’ve been listening,” Ambassador Alvar Higgins replied. He sighed. “Well, Don never promised this would be easy.”
“Can I leave this in your hands?” Emma asked.
“After you get their ships to stand down,” Higgins replied.
“Stand down?”
“Or take them,” Higgins added. “In fact, Commodore, if you can do it without bloodshed that would make my life a lot easier.”
“Very well,” Emma said. She turned to Gerry Walcott. “What do you recommend? Tango or Salsa?”
Those were the code names they’d assigned their favorite plans. Before he could answer, Emma turned back to Simone. “Put me back on with the Exalted. And that gruff idiot.”
“You’re on,” Simone said a moment later.
“Exalted, we want nothing but peace,” Emma said. “Your people have offered nothing but violence. We’ve held off, trying to find a conciliatory path but that has failed. Stand down your ships or lose them. Now.”
“You dare issue commands!” The Exalted shrieked. “We will destroy you!”
“As you wish,” Emma said. “Gerry, drop the shuttles and get us out of here. No sense staying near sharp pointy things.”
“Like lasers,” Gerry Walcott agreed. He commed Colonel Hartman — an older cousin of Don Hartman’s. “Okay, we’re going with Tango.”
“Oh, this will be fun!” Colonel Isadore Hartman said. “Dropping off now.”
“Initiating warp,” Gerry replied.
“Roger, Marines are clear,” Hartman replied three minutes later.
“Have fun!”
“Plan on it!” Hartman replied.
“Ready for Warp One,” Gerry Walcott reported to Emma.
“Engage,” Emma replied. The tender Meath shimmered and exited normal space. Moments later she was accompanied by Commodore David Weiner’s Aristotle and the three remaining ships of her fleet.
The next twenty minutes were something that Emma promised herself she would cherish for eternity.
The three Perky destroyers were well-equipped and modern — by old standards. They had lasers for weapons and relied on running down ships in normal space.
