Riding the Red Horse (19 page)

“Thank you,” John said. Something seemed to be wrong with his hearing. No matter how he tried, he couldn't hear an accent in the woman’s voice. “Where
am
I?”

“HMS
Victorious
,” the woman said. “Welcome home.”

She paused. “There will be a debriefing, sooner or later,” she added, “but for the moment you should rest. You can tell us what happened later.”

“Sure,” John said. He felt numb. Richards was dead, but he couldn't mourn him yet. “It was a piece of cake.”

Rolf Nelson served in the US Army Reserve for six years as a 12 Charlie bridge crewman, a sub-category of combat engineer, achieving the rank of sergeant. A certified teacher, endorsed to teach science, earth science, math, social studies, and history—we have reason to believe he’s the only teacher in the state of Washington certified for both science and social studies—Rolf is also a certified shooting instructor for the National Rifle Association.

He is even licensed to manufacture explosives in conjunction with Boomershoot, an annual event in Idaho where enthusiasts shoot at explosive targets from ranges of 25 yards to 700 yards. He is a lifelong fan of military history and science fiction, and still owns every copy of Jerry Pournelle's
There Will Be War
series. Rolf is the author of the innovative military science fiction series
The Stars Came Back
.

“Shakedown Cruise” is the tale of one of the protagonist in that series, the AI ship
Armadillo
, in some very difficult circumstances.

“Launch arrival drone,” Captain Harrison ordered.

“Drone launched,” weapons officer Samper replied a moment later. “Ready to transition any time.”

“Uploading local scans,” the ship AI spoke up. It was the first ever operational fully self-aware AI, coincidentally installed on an advanced but controversial warship design, who demanded to be called
Armadillo
for some reason known only to itself. It hadn’t done anything yet to deserve the enmity of so many political factions, but neither had it met all its proponents’ expectations. Operational work was the next logical step. “Nothing unusual detected… Transitioning out in three, two–”

Through the thick forward ports the flash of the explosion lit up the bridge as the message drone, the size and shape of a long range missile, blew up spectacularly. On the tactical display the drone icon flashed briefly and disappeared.

“LASER MINES!”

“SKIP!” Harrison snapped. The scattered atoms of gas and dust in space around the ship glowed as the drives were spun back up to transition out of the system, while screens about the bridge flashed damage warnings while the captain and four crewmen on the bridge rapidly assessed the situation.

“Tank sixteen lost a railgun. Hatches twelve and nine damaged. Tank one hit, gunner killed. Hit by at least four mines, looks like a standard ten light-second pattern.”

“Damn,” Harrison cursed. “Ship, how many would that take to catch us like that?”

“Assuming they knew our arrival point within one minute of angle from the primary and one light minute distance, approximately twenty-one thousand,”
Armadillo
replied calmly.

“Wasn’t this supposed to be a shakedown mission for the grav-tank installation?” the communications tech asked, his young face surprised. It was his first real deep space mission, but the ship liked him.

“Every mission is training, shakedown, and get the mission done.”

“Destination?” the pilot asked. “Secondary?”

“No,” Harrison replied quickly, a frown on his face. “Nobody on our shit list has that many mines lying around. Someone had to have inside data. Go…. Bob, pick two numbers between one and ninety.”

The short man at the weapons console chose the first two numbers from the readouts before him. “Sixteen, eighty one.”

“Go north of the ecliptic by sixteen degrees, eight one spinward, and another twenty light minutes out.”

“Aye aye, Captain.”

“Why not the secondary, Captain? It would be much closer.”
Armadillo
asked, sounding curious.

“Caution and suspicion. Too close to be just bad luck, too many mines to be general coverage, too fast to not know we were coming. So, standard secondary will likely be mined, too. We go in random.”

The pilot nodded approvingly as he worked the controls. “We’ll be there in about twenty seconds.”

“Go in silent. No active measures.” The captain grabbed a mic on a cord to address the crew. “Minefield. We skipped and will be transitioning elsewhere in-system shortly. Prepare for zero G and low-power ops. Hang on.” His voice echoed about the ship, prompting anyone not already buckled up or strapped in to secure themselves. The black space outside the ports glowed momentarily as the seventy-two meter ship faded back into the normal universe, then began drifting silently in the blank emptiness.
Armadillo
was now out even farther from the primary star and the planets in the system, the closest being a rocky world with a vast ring of rocks and moonlets glinting in the star’s dim and nearly two hours-old light. All the ships passive sensors are closely watched by eyes both human and electronic, all seeking anything anomalous.

Nothing.

The crew who were not busy with repairs or extracting the dead and injured from the disabled tank slowly relaxed, knowing that the longer they were in real-space, the farther the electro-magnetic disturbance of their transition will spread at the speed of light. After five minutes of nothing but intense concentration on screens and readouts, the com specialists glanced at Captain Harrison. “Send another arrival drone, Sir?”

“No. If we were set up, we don’t want anyone to know we survived. At least, not yet. Still clear inward?”

“Nothing detected.”

“OK, skip as close as you can to Rings, fifteen degrees anti-spinward of it, ten below ecliptic. Unless we are getting shot at immediately, accelerate inward at seventy percent max on the Sokolovs, passive and ultra low power sensors only until we are two light seconds out.”

“Aye aye, Sir.”

While the next transition out of real-space and back again was executed, Captain Harrison contemplated his options. This was supposed to be nothing more than a first operational shakedown and final crew evaluation mission now that all the grav tanks were attached and the Marine complement was aboard, not a live shooting war. Fly in, look around, see if any of the rumors of a ProCom incursion, unauthorized armed ships or smugglers were correct, deal with any minor problems and report back. Simple. Minefields that far out-system were not on the schedule of events, which meant that someone had other plans for them, and furthermore, was privy to data he shouldn’t have.

“Captain?” the ship intruded on his thoughts. “Shouldn’t we report a hostile reception? I’m sure anyone else coming in-system would want to know.” Trust an AI to remember procedure.

“I’m sure they would. But if we are expected, the best solution is to not let anyone know we have survived, and take the offenders out. It’ll take hours for the mines report of firing to get deep in system, hours more to figure out what happened and where we went, and we’ll already be moving fast by then, coming from an unexpected direction. We want to be unpredictable. Surprise can be as decisive as superior firepower,
Armadillo
.”

“I see.”

“That’s why we want as many weapon systems as possible, so we have as many options as possible to surprise opponents with.”

“I suppose that makes sense, although at the moment, I fail to see how ground forces are going to prove useful in a ship-to-ship space battle.”

“Me, neither. But the moment always changes, and the situation won't always be the current one.”

The com specialist looked up at the Captain. “A distress call from a civilian ship. Ore hauler, the
Billings
, crew of twenty. Say they are under attack.”

“And already, you see, the situation changes. Where?”

“No embedded coordinates in the message, compressed voice only. Direction is from a far moon of Rings, timestamp and distance indicates current.”

“Easily forged, and insufficient data to properly analyze.”

“Likely a fake, sir,” the weapons officer seconded the Captain’s opinion.

“At least it’s not
Red Dwarf
,” the pilot cracked. “That would be too obvious.”

“So, ignore it?” asked the navigator.

“Faking a distress call from a location easy to hide in is the oldest trick in the book,” Captain Harrison replied, frowning. “If it’s real, it will likely be over before we get there. Log it for later. Plot for zero relative on the outer edge, land on a small moonlet in the rings.”

“Near edge of the rings, orbit at zero relative final velocity within a half diameter of a moonlet, then land, aye-aye, sir,” the navigator replied crisply as he began working out a clear vector.

“Go in, listen, float for a bit, see what's there or turns up. Prep a pair of probes. We can launch them toward the inner planet and the second gas giant just before we decelerate. Program for high orbit passive search.”

“Aye-aye, sir.”

Samper looked over his shoulder. “Not a thing on the scopes, sir. Uncover for the probe launch?”

“Keep the covers on. Lower profile, keep any bad-luck fairy space-dust out. Just pre-launch programming and systems checks.” Samper nodded acknowledgement and set to work as the captain stroked his chin, deep in thought. “Have the tank crews load Whistlers programmed to broadcast transponder data.” Four sets of eyebrows around the bridge went up. “We can fire them when we get closer. Never know when sowing confusion about what ships are really where might be useful.”

The crew passed the hours accelerating toward the moonlet repairing the damage they could from the laser mines, and putting the one fatality into cold storage until they could have a proper service. A beam had, though sheer bad luck, gone down the barrel of the tank, detonating the ready terminal guidance HE round, killing the gunner. Disintegrating was the more accurate term; a flag-draped casket would be an honor that was not strictly necessary. The distress signal cut out after repeating at random intervals for twenty minutes. And Doc Wheeler, after patching up the injured, was dealt a flush by the injured tank commander in sick bay.

At the halfway point, with peak velocity when deceleration would start, there was still no apparent movement or sign of activity around the ringed planet. A sharp-eyed crewman spotted another ship, designated Target Alpha, hiding under a camo canopy on a tiny moonlet less than five kilometers long, while the rock rotated slowly. It was good visual camouflage, but it failed to hide the ship’s excess radiating heat. At least the bridge crew assumed it was a ship, given the location. Another boxy shape, Target Beta, was seen in a low, slow orbit around a moon in the middle of the ring belt on the far side, roughly the size and shape of a frigate, but the lighting on it was poor so there were no details to be discerned.

“Looks like a party,” Captain Harrison commented as the launch tube covers were opened and the probes were released just before deceleration began. “Any bets on who they are?”

“Yo Mama, they ain't,”
Armadillo
's avatar drawls, a young man in space armor, sans helmet, chewing a stogie.

Harrison rolled his eyes. The AI was a little strange, picking up various habits from the crew, and the formalities of rank seemed incomprehensible to it. But it made puns that were occasionally amusing and even some acute observations at times. “No transponders sending anything out, no distinctive outlines, no obvious anything.”

“We were attacked. We could apply the Arnaldus Amalricus solution,”
Armadillo
declared. The captain grimaced and shook his head while the others on the bridge shot him a puzzled look. “Kill them all. The Lord will know his own,” the AI intoned solemnly, his avatar's face wreathed in faux smoke.

At the weapons station, Samper frowned. “Easier said than done, ship. If those are cruisers or frigates…that’s a lot of firepower floating around out there.”

“Deceleration in ten seconds” the navigator reminded them. Nothing seemed to change, other than the vector on the navigation display suddenly shortening and then reversing. The velocity indicator stopped climbing and started to fall very slowly. “Arrival in eleven hours.”

“Probes away. They’ll be coasting for another day before the course corrections start.”

Three more ships were detected as
Armadillo
decelerated quietly into orbit, Target Charlie was approaching from the opposite direction, blazing bright and not trying to hide its obviously military drive signature. A smaller ship, designated Delta, possibly a prospector, was hopping from one large rock to another. It was obscured by the ring debris, but it looked civilian. Target Echo was hiding next to a large boulder, its distinctive lattice-work frame and modular ordnance dispenser blocks indicating with near certainty a deep-space minelayer. Nearing her final position,
Armadillo
maneuvered slightly so they were hidden from all the ships they knew of, then fired off a dozen Whistlers in different directions, some lobbed toward known ship locations, others toward likely hiding spots, a couple “over the planet’s horizon” on general principle. Then they settled in to wait and see what developed.

The next two days plodded by with marines practicing zero-G drills in the minute gravity field, weapons and system checks, and strategizing. They noted and watched a trio of gunships, small but heavily armed eight-man craft designed for long range recon and harassment strikes, as they decelerated into the system and took up residence a half-million kilometers away on a rock not much larger than they were. But the patient schedule stopped when a marine, fresh from a short walk with his squad around the tiny moonlet they were calling “down” reported back that there was an unknown cruiser anchored about 120 degrees over the horizon, down in a slight crater much like
Armadillo
was. The name painted on the side was
San Clemente
. After calculating rotation and trajectories, it was determined that if it were there when they arrived it wouldn’t have seen them, if it came since then it would have had to have a nearly mirror image of
Armadillo
’s path to avoid having been spotted, a path likely only if they knew
Armadillo
was there already. There was no way to determine which was more likely.