Echo of Tomorrow: Book Two (The Drake Chronicles) (3 page)

“And the device?”

“Oh that, yes it did turn out to be a very interesting bit of engineering,” Pete said. “It’s a navigational system. We duplicated it, tested it, improved on it, and it is now installed on every ship of the fleet, along with the translated nav information.”

“That won’t do us much good until we can get out in this system,” Scott murmured.

“True to a degree, but we now know where, and how they’re entering the solar system. We can at least mine the entrances, or put a blocking fleet there to stop them escaping,” Pete answered.

“That presupposes that we can build sufficient mines, or ships to act as a blockage in the first place,” Scott observed, seeing them nod. “What’s the estimated completion date for the fleet?”

“Essentially it’s ready now,” Pete replied. “Most of the ships are in the final fitting stage or under run-up trials and the crews are already aboard—”

“The new captains will be reading themselves in within the next few hours, and they can start their shakedown runs,” Brock interjected.

Scott made a few notes on his wristcomp, his mind working out the details of how to utilize that many ships. The first sea lord gently nudged the man on each side of him, nodding at Scott. They looked at him, then at Scott, nodding in agreement that they’d made the right choice, since Scott was already working on the problem of deploying his fleet.

“What about fighter and bomber cover? You mentioned carriers?” Scott asked, absently.

“Each of the carriers has the capacity for five hundred space fighters and bombers, as yet you only have three hundred, due to some manufacturing defect,” Pete answered.

“Run that by me again?” Scott said, looking up. Something in the way Pete said it told him something was wrong.

“We didn’t have the capacity here, or in space to build the fighters, so we asked the President of the World Council if he could recommend a manufacturer to do it for us. He found one man who builds anti-grav vehicles and persuaded him to build them to our design. The first one hundred arrived on time, and seemed to be working perfectly, but the first time they went into space and started pulling combat maneuvers they broke up. We were lucky not to lose any pilots.”

“So what happened?”

“On inspection, we found many hidden defects, and if it hadn’t been for the fact we needed to train in space and not just in air, we would never have found them until the first time we went into combat.”

“So it was a deliberate defect that only occurred in space?” Scott shot Pete a look.

“Right. We checked back with the factory but couldn’t locate where the defect originated. The design team here checked with the engineer in the factory, tracing it down to an error in several of the robotics manufacturing computers.”

“Random error?”

“Hell no!” Pete snapped, not bothering to hide his contempt for the present world government. “This was a deliberate attempt at sabotage. But there are no fingerprints to lead back to who.”

“Well, we know the Ayatollah and his merry men directed it, so where are we right now?”

“Rebuilding all the new fighters from scratch, with our people double-checking the computer programming every step of the way.”

“I should bloody well hope so, but it pisses me off. We could be using those men here, instead of playing nursemaid to a bunch of robots,” was Brock’s contribution.

“You see any way around it?” Scott shot back.

Pete nodded. “It’s in the works now. We transferred all airframe manufacturing to England and Ireland with the relevant equipment, and the ones coming from there are even better.” Pete smiled as he said it.

Kat looked up from her second plate of steak and eggs with fries on the side. “Thank Christ for that. I’d hate my people to go into combat with a craft they don’t trust.”

“Are any of the craft already onboard suspect?” Scott asked.

“No, sir. That was one of the first items we checked on. They’re all clean,” Pete answered. “And, again, I think deliberate. They wanted us to think everything was hunky-dory.”

“Good, but more fool them.”

“These people have no concept of sabotage, as we understand it. At the moment it’s just small, random crap that’s more annoying and time-wasting than anything. Like substandard material, missing or out-of-spec parts,” added Brock.

Kat chuckled. “You’ve got that right, Colonel Brock. Military contractors trying to slip in substandard material is as old as the Roman Empire.”

“It’s like a bunch of kids trying to pull the wool over their parent’s eyes. They forget we’ve already been there and done that,” she added.

“Too right!” Brock snapped. “Can’t believe the junk the military’s palmed off on me and my men over the years.”

“Let’s not fall into the trap of underestimating the Ayatollah and his minions.” Scott reminded them. “All this might be new to them, but I’m betting they’re fast learners. Remember the suicide bombers of old?”

It was a somber thought. Over coffee, they discussed the overall situation with the rest of the world, and Scott found out there was growing unrest. There were calls in some quarters for all of “those violent people,” meaning the newly formed army and navy, to be sent to rehabilitation at once, or put down for the good of humanity. Others wanted the World Council to stop the spread of these ideas since more and more young people were walking around in strange-looking uniforms, pretending to be soldiers and causing trouble. What worried them even more was the number of men, and some women, who managed to board the recruit shuttles. The women simply dressed as men, and only revealed who they were after the shuttle landed and they went in to be processed. The word was getting around, and the people weren’t as peaceful as the government thought.

It was inevitable that the recruiting-shuttle crews would run into problems with the “State Security”, or State-Sec police. It all started with what appeared to be a fight close to the shuttle port in what was once Berlin. It was the female scream of pain that caught the crew’s attention, so they went and investigated. Brock had always insisted half the recruiting team should be female, just to emphasize that women were equal in this society. What they found was three half-naked young women being savagely beaten by seven State-Sec goons. A rifle butt to the gut and chin soon had the others fleeing for their lives, and the team quickly transported the injured girls to the shuttle. It turned out that the three females had dressed up as men, dirtied their faces, and were attempting to get to the shuttle. The goons caught them, and that led to the ensuing beating. After that, Brock doubled the teams with orders to patrol the landing zone perimeter. That at least would give anybody a chance to get to the shuttle without interference. But State-Sec could still waylay the potential recruits before they reached the zone. Many of the would-be marines turned up bloodied, or with nasty injuries. The imams were screaming about “contamination” and apostates at Friday evening services, and promised terrible punishment for any man, let alone a woman daring to board the accursed “infidel” shuttle.

“Let them scream, we’ll get on with the job at hand,” Scott said upon hearing this. In a way, it was expected. Even recruits they rejected, having seen a little of what went on here, had taken the story back with them.

“Anything else?” he said.

“There is one item we’re worried about,” added Pete.

“Spill it.”

“You remember the scenes of all those people standing around doing nothing while their children were being taken away?”

“Yes.”

“That puzzled me. We found a few more odd items in the warship, and I have the impression that the items are some sort of emotion-damping field,” concluded Pete. That brought raised eyebrows around the table.

“I haven’t seen any report on this,” the First Sea Lord replied.

“No. You wouldn’t, because we haven’t written one, for obvious reasons,” Pete answered.

“Did you try any of these devices to see if you could duplicate this effect?” Scott said. An obvious question, but he knew Pete would have moved heaven and Earth to find out.

“Yes, but so far I can’t find that they have any effect on our people, or the aliens. But, they did seem to affect our new recruits to some degree. I guess whatever Kessler did to us made the old-timers immune to the effect.”

“What was Doc Chase’s opinion?”

“He mumbled something about our aggression quota and adrenaline.”

“Hum. Not very helpful,” Scott muttered.

“He’s working on it.”

“I hope so. I’d hate to go toe-to-toe with these assholes, and then find out half my crews can’t fight.” Scott saw people around the table nodding.

“What about the news media?” Scott asked. That brought a few smiles around the table.

Jeff snorted a laugh. “The main news outlet is an Aljazeera-style twenty-four-hour news service, and the news anchor is the local equivalent of ‘
Bagdad Bob
.’ Most of the local outlets pretty much parrot what they report, with some local stuff thrown in to make it look ‘fair and balanced.’ The word is getting out that a bunch of lunatics are running around free down here, without actually saying
where
we are. The story is, we’re the result of an old failed medical experiment and we’d been frozen for fifty years or so.”

“Typical, half-truths and outright lies,” Scott said.

“Oh, it gets better. In his compassioned wisdom, the Grand Ayatollah had graciously permitted us to live out our lives here, rather than permit our madness to infect, or contaminate the prosperous, peaceful existence of the rest of the people who live under the compassionate guiding hand of Allah, and his prophet, Mohammed, blessed be his name …” Jeff stopped to take a deep breath. Scott shook his head.

“Heaven preserve us,” Brock growled. “You’d think after three hundred years we’d be past that sort of nonsense.”

“Oh, that’s not all. The imams are calling for us to be … what was the word they used? Oh yes, we should be eradicated for the good of the rest of the faithful,” Jeff stated.

Scott shook his head. “Sounds about right.”

“They’re also jumping up and down in screaming fits, and warning of all sorts of eternal damnation for anyone who even
thinks
about coming here to join up.” Jeff laughed. “Not that it’s stopping the young men and a few women from sneaking aboard the extra late-night shuttles we put on.”

“So, even President Westwood is swimming upstream on this one.”

“Yeah, and he hasn’t come out publically to endorse our recruitment,” Brock groused. “Can’t blame him really. He’s walking a political tightrope as it is. He and a few other powerful people want the abductions stopped, and at the moment we’re the only game in town that has a hope of doing that.” Brock swore under his breath.

“They have to be smart enough to realize that at some point, we have to take the fight to the aliens, damn it! That means we need the ships and crews to do it …”

Scott held up his hand. “Brock, at the moment they’re thinking short term. Stop the abductions and the rest of the problem will just go away.”

“True,” Brock murmured.

“One of these days they’re going to wake up to the fact that we will, at some point in the future, have to take this fight to them.” Scott saw people around the table nodding in agreement. “So, first we stop them here, then regroup and consider our next move.” He didn’t doubt they’d stop the aliens. It was just a question of how long and how much blood they would have to shed doing it: the aliens’ and theirs.

After the meal was cleared away, they got down to fleet deployment, estimated ship production, crew training and a host of other concerns. Whether the World Council wanted it or not, they had an army, navy, and air force again. As the military had done for centuries, they got down to the business of planning to defend those same civilians who wanted to get rid of them. At eighteen hundred hours the meeting broke up, and taking Kat along, Scott found a vehicle and a driver and had him take them to Brock’s home. Kat gave him a puzzled look as he knocked on the door of the neat, two-story prefab.