Well-Traveled Rhodes (Kinsella Universe Book 6) Read online

  “Think before you speak -- and you are going to have to speak. And as you may have noticed, the presence of an ensign at this table isn’t the most common thing. Not since First Rome. But I tell you true,” he waved around the table. “I was here, sitting behind Hannah. Commander Shapiro wasn’t here, but everyone heard the story. Hannah Sawyer sat in the chair you’re sitting in right now. At the end of the brief, she was the first to comment. You picketed Nagoya’s house; well, Hannah Sawyer stood up and cussed him to his face.

  “She cussed every admiral and captain in the room. To their faces. A five-star admiral, two four-star admirals, a couple of three stars, a bunch of other admirals and more captains than you can shake a stick at.”

  Commander Shapiro chuckled, “And your chances of doing that again and surviving are very close to zero. Better to be polite.” There was a brief pause and she lowered her voice. “Hush now! We’re going to get started!”

  A woman Cindy recognized as Admiral Kinney entered the room, followed by Captain Sanchez. No one said anything, but everyone stood up, Cindy a half second late.

  The admiral sat down, and Cindy sat down, this time with everyone else.

  “We heard a short while ago from the Fargo,” Admiral Kinney said without preamble. “The enemy fleet is now a smidge less than three light years out. As near as we can tell, they’ll drop sometime after 1314 Zulu, day after tomorrow.

  “They continue in loose association, the formation being about three light hours in diameter. There are still the recorded two thousand and one hundred and sixty ships. Our ability to read ship types is still minimal, but Fargo reports that forty of those ships are significantly larger than the others. Those will be carriers and command and control.

  “Even though we know they are coming, even though we know their general destination, we do not know where they will drop from fans. Someplace in the solar system, we’re sure about that.”

  Cindy felt a shiver run through her. More than two thousand enemy ships were about to attack Earth? And there had been no warnings back home?

  “We have deployed five hundred cruisers around Earth, plus there are more than a thousand laser-missile armed fighters available for close defense. There are dozens of orbital forts close to Earth and nearly a hundred more elsewhere in the system. There are another four hundred cruisers tasked with defending the other parts of the system and two thousand more fighters.

  “In addition, we have two additional strike groups. The Dragon group, consisting of Dragon and her sister Tiger, plus two dozen escorts, and the Rome group, consisting of Rome and Athens and three dozen escort cruisers. Rome and Athens will add nearly another two thousand fighters to the battle. Dragon and Tiger are battle moons, armed with a great many lasers and mind-boggling numbers of missiles.”

  A map appeared on a screen over the conference table. “Admiral Jensen will command the defense of Earth; Admiral Saito will act as his assistant. Admiral Tennyson will command the Rome group from the MacArthur, while Captain Heisenberg will command the Dragon group from Dragon.”

  There was a pause. “Dragon group will go to fans a few minutes before we think the initial assault will begin. They, like Rome and Athens, and their escorts are currently inert, not radiating anything. They will receive data dumps from the passive sensor sats, the active sensors have been off for weeks now. We’ve very quietly trebled the number of those satellites. Sometimes they shoot up the active satellites, but we’ve never noted them firing on the passive sensors.

  “Rome and Athens, will, at least at first, remain inert. The operations officers have gotten the list of our prearranged jumps... we don't see those changing for obvious reasons.

  “Our enemy has never tried to employ latch-frame and there are dozens of indications that they cannot beat light speed in inter-ship communication.

  “Further, we have been very careful to do as little as possible to show the enemy that we have figured out how to detect vessels on High Fan. We are reasonably sure that they expect to surprise us.”

  Admiral Kinney looked around the quiet room. “In theory, this should be a slam dunk. We’re going to have more fighters than they have ships. Each fighter, because we’re fighting at home, is going to be carrying three ship killer missiles. Every last defender at Earth has Blue Generation lasers, with some of the cruisers having as many as sixteen. Cruisers are all armed with ship killer missiles as well, four hundred per ship.

  “Then there are Dragon, Tiger, Rome and Athens. This is Earth; this is for all the marbles. Dragon will orient to attack carriers and command and control, Tiger will be sent to provide close-in defense for the planet. All the other numbers pale, when it comes to Dragon and Tiger. Dragon and Tiger are each armed with one thousand Blue lasers and forty-five thousand ship killers. Rome and Athens are hold-backs, the final reserve. We have two hundred Blues and two thousand ship killers each. In the event we engage, we’ll have everything that can fly up as well, all of which will have two or three ship killers aboard.

  “The biggest question has been, from the beginning, how will they attack? Will they concentrate their force, as they did at Gandalf or will they disperse their ships as they’ve done in every other large attack since?

  “The theorists say the worst option, from our point of view, would be a repeat of Gandalf. The whole force dropping from fans within two light seconds of Earth. If that were to happen, we would have no choice to but launch all of our fighters at once, regardless of the risk to the carriers. Dragon would come in close and join Tiger in what would be the ultimate barroom brawl.

  “The best option, from our point of view, would be a repeat of Fleet World, where they emerge in the outer system and start launching missiles. They took it on the chin that time and no missiles got through. This time that attack would render them into space gas. Well churned space gas.”

  The admiral looked around the room, while everyone else sat silently.

  “So, those are the outlines of our plan. All of you were tasked, with one exception, to study the plan and be prepared to offer comments.”

  Cindy had been told it would come, yet she’d had a moment’s hope when the admiral had talked about an exception.

  “As per the custom, Ensign Rhodes, the most junior officer, goes first. Lieutenant Zodiac clearly could not have had an ulterior motive in his hot pursuit of a new ops officer.”

  There were chuckles around the room. “Ensign, your thoughts, please.”

  “Admiral, may I ask a question?”

  The admiral smiled her most grandmotherly smile. This time Cindy knew she was really the Wolf trying to impersonate the Grandmother in Little Red Riding Hood. “Certainly, Ensign.”

  “I just want to be sure of something, so that maybe I can lay to rest any concerns some might have about why I’m here. The plan is to kill them all, right?”

  “Every last single one,” Captain Sanchez said, his eyes gleaming.

  “I don’t have the technical competence, Admiral, to say anything about the details of this plan. But,” Cindy brought her hands together and started clapping. “I applaud the objective!”

  Zodiac was a second behind her, when he started clapping, and then Commander Shapiro. The next person to clap was Captain Sanchez, in a few seconds, there was applause all around the table.

  Admiral Kinney raised her hand, and the applause stopped a whole lot faster than it had started.

  “Not so long ago, another young woman sat in that chair,” Admiral Kinney said, facing Cindy. “A woman whose technical competence was beyond reproach; if a little intemperate at times in her phrasing.”

  There was a roll of laughter throughout the compartment -- everyone in Fleet Aloft had heard the story. “I agree, your professional competence isn’t what it could be, but I’m sure you’ll remedy that soon enough, Ensign. Thank you, Ensign, for the temperate remarks.”

  There were repressed sniggers again.

  Admiral Kinney turned the smallest bit. “Lieutenant Zodiac, your
thoughts?”

  “I was thinkin’, Admiral, that it might be possible to take fighters out the bay doors by hand and position them on the hull. The question I have as a result, can the boffins tell us if they’d be detected?”

  It was Captain Wakia who stood up. “Admiral, by your leave?”

  “Captain, proceed.”

  “Yes, Lieutenant. We feel sure they have observers in system and that we may be under visual observation. Another high order possibility is that they are reading our active scan reports -- which is why the sensors are offline. Rome's fans are running in standby, so we’ll be able to go to High Fan instantly when they start dropping from High Fan, but we should remain undetectable until then. We’ll launch fighters by squadron as we drop from fan after that. Unless we have to go down to Earth, in which case, we’ll start launching and stop only when there’s nothing left aboard that will fly.”

  “It’s going to take us half an hour to launch all the fighters, if they give us the time, twice that if we’re jumping to evade enemy missile launches,” Zodiac said, speaking to the admiral. “I’m worried they won’t give us the time. I don’t want fighters arriving after it’s over.”

  “And what would you suggest?” Admiral Kinney sounded mildly irritated.

  “They are limited to light speed in their communications. We’re not. Every last single fighter has latch-frame quantum communications. After the battle, they are going to know we detected them far enough in advance to try a trap. Thus, I think we should start launching fighters at 1300. That means we will have them all up within fifteen minutes of the estimated attack. There is no way, no matter where they drop, no matter where they have observers, for those observers to alert the main body as to what we’re doing. Not if they are limited to light speed communications.”

  There was a lot of discussion about Zodiac’s proposal, then more comments from other officers. As the meeting progressed, few suggestions got more than a passing nod.

  Afterwards Cindy sought out Zodiac. “I’ve been studying, Zodiac. I thought a fighter squadron needed months of time to learn to work together.”

  “It does. A finely tuned squadron is a beautiful instrument. However, we’d only been in combat a few weeks on First Rome when we realized that some of the squadrons had taken serious losses and needed replacements. Reluctantly, we started breaking up some of the less successful squadrons and integrating them into the better squadrons.

  “Eventually, well -- there was no work up time. You’d fly with a squadron one day, survive and fly with another squadron the next day. It stopped mattering if it was your squadron that was broken up or your squadron was the one receiving replacements. It all depended on which leader survived.

  “So, yeah, we’d like to workup a squadron using time-tested methods. We’ve been flying together for a couple of weeks, but not doing formal work ups, just getting used to each other. It’s more than we had the last six weeks of First Rome. We did better on Second Rome... but there were a lot of days you saluted your new squadron CO, someone you'd never seen before in your life, stepped into your beast and flew.”

  He paused and looked at her, and then sighed. “There is no good way to say this -- so mostly we don’t. You’re new and you don’t understand yet.

  “We know our enemies had scouted us for about forty years before they launched the war. We’re positive they have observation posts in all or most systems, even if we’ve never found one.

  “We’ve seen what they look like -- whales with hands, and you couldn’t substitute one of them for one for us for a millisecond. Yet, there is no way the Federation can know for sure if they have agents in place that we can’t detect. Or if they’ve been monitoring our communication channels. We don’t think so, but we simply don’t know.

  “For sure if we’d been scouting an enemy for that long we’d have made extreme efforts to understanding their transmissions and inserting whatever kind of intelligence gathering assets we thought we could get away with.

  “We have never found any sort of evidence of such a penetration or even an attempt at such a penetration. Nonetheless, the official, if unstated position, is that they could be listening to us at any time. Thus, we discuss secret things in as few places as we can limit them to, we carefully encrypt things -- and we effort a great deal of time and energy to counter-espionage.

  “And, of course, part of that effort is that the deepest secrets are the most closely held -- like the fact that we’ve been preparing a trap for them for six months now.

  “Again, we go back to First Rome. Cindy, we were crazy at the end of that mission. Simply insane, every last one of us. We’d undergone too much stress, too many defeats, and too many narrow escapes. We focused on our mission objectives and stopped paying attention to objective reality.

  “We had, before Hannah blew out that planet, killed about fifteen hundred cruiser class ships -- that was more than the Federation had had at the start of the war. Hannah was the one who remarked on it. God! We were insane to let her do what she did! She thought they’d brought up nearly every ship they had available to eliminate our first probe into their territory. They wanted to keep us ignorant, but they wanted to intimidate us as well.

  “And we blew it! We blew it! We should have turned around and skedaddled home right then! We were risking them completing their mission objectives -- stopping our first incursion cold with what has to be a mostly symbolic victory.”

  “But you blew up one of their planets, didn't you?”

  “Actually, the best guess is that we blew up an outpost,” Zodiac told her bluntly. “We think they inhabit gas giants. We think they need something like pressure suits in reverse to get around on an Earth-class planet.”

  “Oh,” Cindy said, surprised.

  “The important thing, what we didn’t think about at the time because we were focused on something else, was that we’d really dinged their available supply of ships.

  “Second Rome faced significantly less opposition and we were hoping to face even less with this next deployment.” He laughed bitterly. “There were even some expecting a knock-out punch and they would either sue for peace, or we could start applying some serious whup-ass to more of their planets.

  “People have their heads so far up their hind ends that they don’t realize that the sun don’t shine. I’m not privy to exactly what’s going on, but I do know that it would take us decades to explore the space the Federation is in from scratch, trying to find all of our colonies. There are thousands of stars and hundreds of planets.

  “Then, out of nowhere, we found they were coming here with something like two thousand ships. That really set back all the planners. It’s been more than a year -- so if a year ago we knocked out the bulk of their fleet -- where did these ships come from?

  “Moreover, these ships don't seem to realize that they are being shadowed. For First Rome we had some of the early sensors that detected ships under High Fan. We used them a lot -- it seems incredible that they didn't notice. So it could this whole thing is simply be a trap.

  “We just don’t know -- but we do know they are coming and that if we want to survive, we have to knock them back really hard. We can’t let them do any significant damage here. There are still too many of humanity’s eggs in this system -- we’re talking about a fourth of the industrial infrastructure left in the Federation. Losing that really would be a crippling blow!

  “So, we’re going to trap them and try to clean their clocks. Our duties are relatively light, and, at least at first, what Rome will do is just launch fighters from a point where we don’t think they can detect us for as long as we can, until they do detect us. Unless they change their minds and let us attach ships to the hull, jump in, launch the whole she-bang at once, then jump away, we aren't going to get many fighters away undetected.”

  “Zodiac!” Cindy could read between the lines. If the fighters were detected launching, Rome would have enemies coming after them -- and they wouldn't be able to launch f
ighters if they were having to avoid attackers.

  He smiled wanly. “Two last things, Cindy. You need to spend some time tonight and finish the basic certificates. You have to. And then, when you go to sleep, I want you to think on this.”

  He ran his fingers over the Fleet Marine insignia that looked very out of place on his dead black fighter pilot shipsuit.

  “I’m a Marine, slumming with the sky pilots,” he told her. “Some of my mates think I’m a traitor. Ask yourself, Cindy, how many Marines like me it would take to invade and conquer a planet like Earth.”

  He walked away, leaving her shaking her head. Then it hit her.

  The only way to not blow up an alien planet was going to be to conquer it. Zodiac was right! It would mean tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of casualties! Maybe millions!

  With cold certainty she understood something about Mongo Zodiac, something she’d never really comprehended before. He’d become a fighter pilot because it was the only way to fight the enemies who were killing his mates. And if his mates were going down to a planet to beard their enemies in their dens? He’d go there, too.

  She swallowed. He was going to die. Well, everyone died, but he wasn’t going to live very long. If not in a space battle, in a battle down on a planet. How could you live, knowing your doom was approaching steadily?

  She had no idea.

  She went back to her compartment, got her materials and went to the education center and tore into the course materials.

  She finished the basic certificates and took the exams. They were, for someone like her who took exams really well, dead cert simple. She stretched and went to the chief to see about what she should do next.

  “As I said, we’ll give you a general education test and then start you on the path to other certificates,” she was told. “On the other hand, Ensign, I’m not stupid. Return to your quarters and get some sleep. I don’t want to see you for four days, do you understand? In four days further certificates may or may not be relevant. If they are, I promise you, we’ll get you through them as well as they can be gotten through.”