Jethro 3: No Place Like Home

Copyright © 2014 by Chris Hechtl

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book and or portions thereof in any form.

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional. Any resemblance to other people is in parody or is purely coincidental. ;)

Cover art by Chris Hechtl
Models purchased from Daz3d.com or Renderosity.com or made by Chris Hechtl
Copy edited/proofed by: Gord Archer, Thomas Burrows, Poon Yee, Jory Gray, Tim Brown, and Ulrich Schlegel
Edited by Rea Myers
Reformatted by Goodlifeguide.com

Let’s see; I've dedicated books to my fans, to the beta folks (thanks again both) to my family...Anne McCaffrey, who else is there? James Cameron? Christopher Stasheff? Lol. Wow, loads of people if I went that way I suppose. But it still boils down the big three, the fans, beta folks and my family. Thank you all for supporting me in this and making it possible.

ACT I

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10

ACT II

Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21

ACT III

Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31

Epilogue
Searchlight: Pyrrhic Victory
Author's Afterward
Dramatic personnel:
Appendix
Sneak Peek:

Author's Note:

The following starts just after
Jethro 2 First to Fight
and during the Admiral's long jump, as well as the beginning of
Pirates Bane
. It then picks up at the end of
Pirates Bane
and then goes on from there.

Hopefully, it will answer some of the questions and lingering doubts people have. As I like to say, there is a method to the madness!

…And now, on with the story!

Chapter 1

“Bored?” First Lieutenant Valenko, grizzly bear and Commander of Valenko's squad, asked his senior noncom, Jethro McLintock. “I just signed off on your name change. It's going up the chain by the way.”

“I never thought it would involve so much paperwork, sir,” Jethro said, shaking his head.

“Yeah, good luck with it. You'll need it. It takes an act of congress to get some things done sometimes,” the bear said, snorting. He eyed the black panther. “So, again, bored?”

“Something like that. I'm a cat and yeah, we're used to laying about and sleeping, but this is for the birds,” Jethro said, waving a hand to the troop bay. Valenko looked up. Some of the Marines were asleep, others talking, playing games or working out. Most were just slacking off. But he knew a few were replaying their recent bit of intense combat in their minds. He knew, because he was one of them. He intended to get it out in the open and try to learn from it like Gunny Schultz had taught them.

“Well, we can't have that. Well, let's get together on our combat and see what holes we need to plug. You in?”

“Of course, sir,” Jethro said with an ear flick. As if there was any other response he could give, he thought with a wry half smile. He had been tapped to keep an eye on the Marine recruits but Major Pendeckle had downplayed training them up to standard while in transit. The Major was still catching up on paperwork, so until they had that sorted out and the recruits run through basic physicals, there was little he could do with them other than stick them in front of a video screen and pop a movie in.

Less than a year ago Valenko's squad had been training and getting into the usual mischief on Agnosta, the new primary training center for Federation Marines. The planet was quite beautiful, if a bit scarred from her past and her most recent encounter with the Horathian pirates. Pirates had cut a swatch through the sector and would have continued except for the heavy cruiser they were currently riding around in and Fleet Admiral John Henry Irons.

Captain Pendeckle (he was an honorary Major on a ship due to the tradition that there could be only one Captain on board) had led Valenko's squad and other Marines in the First Agnosta Marine Expedition. They had stamped out the remaining pirates on the planet and built off the diplomatic work Admiral Irons had laid when he had passed through in the Zanzibar class Freighter Destiny. Now the planet was recovering with the help of Marines who had established a training base on one of the major island chains.

The squad had been minding its own business on the planet, doing duty as DIs and generally getting into mischief when a civilian ship had jumped in, the Lieandra. She had screamed for help, and Captain Mayweather, skipper of the heavy cruiser Firefly, had responded. Lieandra's Veraxin Captain had reported that the enemy was intent on attacking Antigua, a system Fleet Admiral John Henry Irons had recently left. Apparently, the Admiral had found a ghost city station and had restored her. The pirates, being pirates, had seen the opportunity for loot and were headed that way.

In a whirlwind of orders, shuttles had flown like a blizzard between Firefly and the planet, taking on stores, fuel and Marines like Valenko's squad.

One of their comrades, corporal Deja, had taken over the hypernavigator and helmsman seat during the jump through the star systems leading to Antigua. The Selkie was one of the gifted few who could navigate in the upper hyperbands close to a system, allowing Firefly to shave months off her journey.

They had arrived a few weeks after the Horathians had arrived and begun occupying the station and system. Fortunately, the planet was partially protected by powerful ground side weapons platforms, or so they had thought. The Horathians had proven the Admiral right in rock bombing the planet, hammering some of their defenses flat in a terrifying siege that had killed over ten thousand innocent people. The final body count would have to be estimated; some of the towns and small cities that had been turned into craters had lacked a current census.

Firefly had arrived and had taken the pressure off the planet. She and her squadron of fighters had smashed the enemy fleet, breaking them up into smaller and smaller chunks and taking them down one at a time.

The Marines had performed boarding actions to capture enemy ships and then had been tasked with retaking the station city, Antigua Prime. Lieutenant Valenko had led the initial assault in full-powered armor to form a beachhead. A platoon of Marines had come along with them in successive waves. The fighting had been quite fierce with many casualties and fatalities.

After the battle the people on the station and the planet had come out of their hiding places and buried their dead. Then they had rejoiced their salvation and embraced the idea of a fleet, quite a change from what the Admiral had bitterly experienced before he had departed.

During the aftermath, Valenko's squad and most of the veterans had been scattered on various missions all over the system. Now that the system was stable and had some defenses Firefly was racing back to Pyrax to head off what scuttlebutt said was more Horathian trouble. This time aimed at Pyrax.

In their off time over the course of the next week, Jethro and Valenko worked on refining the Marine boarding tactics, going over what had happened in deep debriefs. Some of what they covered had been covered before in the months after the battle, but they tried to look at it from a fresh perspective.

They interviewed each of the Marines on the ship, pulling a blow-by-blow description from them and then going over it all again with the video playback. They reviewed the plot and sensor imagery from every Marine as well as footage they had pulled from Antigua Prime's security cameras. Those cameras that had been functional at the time of the boarding, that was.

They even gamed out the Horathian side, drawing the ship's AI Commander Firefly into the project. The AI helped by plotting the positions of all participants on both sides on a map of the station. Watching the battle unfold from that viewpoint took some of the personal attachments out of the equation.

Interestingly, word of their project made its way around the ship. Some grumbled, but then the Senior Tactical Officer Purple Thorn got involved. She pulled apart her own hot wash of the space battle and then applied some of Valenko and Jethro's observation methods into the mix. The battle had been a hot topic for a while, but after six days it was becoming stale, which was something Valenko wanted. He wanted people to accept it and move on.

They pulled no punches when they presented their findings to Captain turned
Major
Pendeckle a week out from Antigua. Major Pendeckle was initially amused by the hard-hitting assessment. Valenko pointed out his own mistakes with a bullet point on how to retrain to prevent them in the future. “You're being too hard on yourselves don't you think? We won remember?”

“Yes, sir. But it could have gone better.”

“Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.”

“Sir, if we don't learn from our mistakes...”

“Yes I know. But there is a fine line here. You can't know everything. No plan survives contact with the enemy. No plan will ever go off perfectly. Cut yourselves some slack. Get some downtime for spirit of space sake!” He scowled. “I can't believe I'm saying this but catch a movie or go play a game. Relax damn it!”

“Yes, sir,” the bear replied.

The human rolled his eyes. “It's like talking to a wall with you F platoon nut jobs. You're all gung ho crazy. Bug house nuts. Seriously, cut yourselves some slack,” he said, hands clasped in front of him. “Yes, learn from it, but there are times in combat when you either have to accept what happened and move on or don't and have a nervous breakdown. You can't control everything. People screw up; they die. Even with all the training you two threw at Fonz he still got stupid and died. Bad luck and stupidity, a lethal combination. Shit like that happens. It happens too often I'm afraid. More training may or may not break others of that, or it might drill out initiative and other things we want to nurture. So watch it,” he warned with a cautionary finger.