Jethro: First to Fight (72 page)

“But... they could be spoofing it!”

“It's a possibility, but a remote one.
The admiral gave us protocols. Sprite embedded them in our implants and sent
the other half of the encryption key as well as data about us out to Pyrax.
They have it obviously.”

“But...”

“If they had known about us before they
would have acted on that knowledge, not let us play this cat and mouse game we
have been playing the past ten days,” Hishina Fu said. Her husband nodded. From
his look he was going with her this time, a role reversal. Rasha hid a smile.
She'd love to be a fly on the bulkhead when they finally had enough alone time
to bring up Hishina's hidden secret. Obviously she'd kept it hidden even from
her husband.

Now was the moment. Now was the time to
seize the initiative, while the enemy on the station was off balance and
focused on the battle outside, they had to act, Rasha was sure of it. She was
tired of waiting, tired of watching people die, helpless to stop it.

Rasha was excited. “We have to chance
it,” she said firmly, gathering the requested data. “They'll need detailed
plans of the station, plus the location of every pirate on board. Everything
we've gathered on their weapons and command structure as well. We'll have to
coordinate with them the best we can, keep them up to date as well as our
allies.”

The pirates had secured most of the
antenna on the station, but of course not all. Nor all the satellites in the
system. The station and system were vast, and the people on the station quite
clever. They knew how to get around their own system after all, and how to send
a brief burst signal to an intended destination. That was how they had kept in
touch with assets in the system as well as keeping the government on the planet
up to date.

Governor Randall hadn't been much help,
assuring them he was marshaling forces, but what could he do at the bottom of
the planet's gravity well with no shuttles to speak of? Yan Fu had held out
that the proper authorities would deal with the pirates. Some on the council
had counseled patience and negotiation. At least they had shut up after
witnessing the first series of executions. Murmurs of it all being a 'mistake'
and 'misunderstanding' had also died off when the pirates were recorded
gleefully raping and killing people. It sickened quite a few people.

Two of their council hadn't been able to
handle the stress. Marisa and the ancient Gashg Ripper hadn't been able to
handle the stress of the pirate attack and destruction of their beloved home
for a second time. Marisa had dissolved into quiet hysteria and then
voluntarily shut her life support off while in a deep well of depression.
Ripper had seen his beloved park set ablaze with people inside and in impotent
rage he had locked the hatches shut on the pirates in the compartment, then
shut off the fire suppression system and life support. By the time the pirates
had broken in everyone was dead. Ripper had sent Yan Fu a defiant “I'm not
sorry,” letter before he terminated his own life support.

Other counselors were on the edge, long
time lovers Nina and Elyria were considering death. Their boss D'red had so far
talked them out of it and kept them busy.

“We'll need to keep a running plot on
them.”

“Which we've been doing. Or we've been
trying to do anyway,” Gwen said. The Taurens, AI, and cybers were all
interlinked in a virtual council of war.

“Package finished. I'm sending it now.
We can send an update later,” Rasha said.

Over the past ten days they had managed
to keep their people under wraps, helping the Taurens and other aliens fight
back. The AI had fought off the pirate viruses designed to take control of the
computers on the station. In a last ditch effort they had firewalled off the
critical systems and then created a virtual world for the viruses to occupy.
The pirates thought they now had control of the computers. Little did they know
that the inhabitants were echoing their commands to the computer with only a
microsecond of delay.

A few on the council had wanted to
surrender or commit suicide, but their ally in Hishina and surprisingly her
husband Yan Fu, along with a few other others had prevented that. The pirates
had also shown them that they weren't interested in such things as fair or
honor, the public executions of any alien or Neo captured, along with the
execution of two human personnel managed to show them that.

They had laid low, keeping as many of
the non humans safe as they could, while aiding in the fighting of the
guerrilla war while keeping the enemy off balance and out of the control room.
Fortunately their centuries of playing ghosts and their fighting on their own
home ground for their people gave them quiet an advantage.

“It's time. It's time to kick ass,”
Warner said grimly.

“No, not quite yet, but close,” Hishina
said, eyes hard. She was surprised to see more than one former pacifist nod or
indicate agreement.

...*...*...*...*...

Firefly received the response from the
Warners. It wasn't unexpected, but the comm officer and the AI did independent
identity checks on the signal.

Admiral Irons had sent along a complete
download of his adventures in Antigua, complete with sets of information about
the reservists. Firefly checked their files against what the admiral had sent
and then informed his Captain.

“Are you sure they're legit?”

“Aye skipper. IFF responses and counter
responses authenticated. Both what we had on file as well as what the admiral
and Commander Sprite had set up before they left the system.”

“All right then. Get a download from
them and make sure 'Major' Pendeckle and the Marines get a copy soonest.”

“Aye aye Captain.”

“They want to know how they can help
Captain,” the comm officer said, looking up with one hand on his ear.

The Captain frowned and then looked over
to the comm officer. “Tell them if they have any shuttles or other craft, prep
them for possible SAR duty soonest. And keep their people on damage control.
When these people figure out they aren't going to win it could get ugly. We can
dodge, the station
can't
.”

“Um, aye aye Captain,” the comm officer replied.
He spoke softly into his hush mike.

...*...*...*...*...

Rasha Warner received the third signal,
thought about it for a moment and then nodded. She passed it on silently to her
husband and the others and then sent another out, this one a brief burst of
data to a set of rocks between the solar farm and the yard. Mairi needed to be
alerted to what was going on.

...*...*...*...*...

Governor Randall received the signal
from the station. “It's a trick!” his aide said. He shook his head. “We can't
trust it sir! We don't know if it's true!”

“Trick or not, something's happening. We
need to be ready for it.”

“Sir, we can't just take this on faith.
We have no basis of understanding any of this, we don't know the people
involved!”

“I understand that,” the governor
replied stubbornly. “Put the space defenses on alert. Those that are left,” he
said bitterly. The pirates had been clever, dropping rocks on the defensive
installations just as the admiral had predicted. The rocks that were chewed up
by the planetary defense centers had still rained down on them, just in broken
masses instead of one big lump. Those that were intercepted at least, they'd
found that shooting the rocks down was hard, the ancient planetary defense
fortresses hadn't been well maintained over the years, their targeting systems
quite frankly sucked.

Also he'd had some political issues.
Some mayors had howled when their electrical power had been shunted to defense.
Two mayors had flat out refused to shunt the power until rocks had gotten perilously
close to the atmosphere, only the imminent threat of the rocks falling directly
on their heads had woken them to the danger.

“Alert the militia. Have them standing
by.”

“For...”

“For I don't know!” he replied in
exasperation, tired of the attitude. He threw his hands up in the air. “For the
sky to fall, for space to give up it's dead, for an invasion, I don't know.
Just get them mobilized!”

“Yes sir,” the aide said, scurrying off.

...*...*...*...*...

Rasha Warner kept Firefly up to date
with intel. The station had recorded every transmission between the pirate
vessels as well as between the vessels and the pirates who invaded the station.
A lot of it was encrypted, but they could still tease some details out of the
mess.

The communications to the station,
planet, and other natives were of course not encrypted. Nor were the
conversations pirates had with each other inside the station. All of that was
zipped and sent to Firefly in one massive upload.

One of the things she passed on was a
force appreciation. According to their intel the pirates had converted two of
the freighters to transports in anticipation of seizing star systems and
holding them. When they had heard about Antigua they had beat feet to the star
system. The better part of two thousand pirates were on the transports, the
station, and in control of the yard.

“Lovely,” Captain Mayweather said,
reading the news. She passed it on to 'Major' Pendeckle. “I guess you and your
people have their work cut out for them,” she said.

“Seems that way ma'am,” the 'Major
replied, scowling.

“I guess you're going to earn your pay
the hard way,” Shelby said softly, eyes troubled. The 'Major' nodded.

“At least we know the enemy and have a
small peek at their command structure. Their ground force leader on Antigua
Prime is a Major Zimmer.”

“Zimmer huh?”

“Yes. I've got some work to do. I need
to get a handle on this video. I've already dumped it to my intel specialist
and Lieutenant Valenko ma'am, but we...”

“Excused. Dismissed 'Major',” the
Captain said airily. “Now let me fight my ship,” Captain Mayweather said in
anticipation.

“Aye aye ma'am. Good luck, goddess
speed,” the Major replied as he saluted and about faced.

Mayweather ignored him, eyes glued to
the main display.

...*...*...*...*...

“Captain, they are within the outer
range of seeing through the decoy,” Tr'j'ck stated, waving a truehand.

“I see that,” the Captain said, leaning
in close. They were steadily creeping in close but they were still two million
kilometers out, not quite in the outer edge of Firefly's energy weapon
engagement basket, but close. Still, it was a lot closer than she'd thought
she'd get. “We're going to hammer this Sirius into scrap.”

“You don't want to capture her?”

“Oh hell no, I'm not the admiral.
Besides, you pointed out we're outnumbered. No, no pussy footing around here.
We're going to take her down, not pussy foot around.”

“Aye aye Captain.”

“Get ready to drop stealth. When we
drop, helm, I want to go full bore as soon as you have full power. We're going
to cut right in on the destroyer.”

“They had edged down on the task force's
negative Y axis, coming in from their five o’clock low. “Guns, get as good a
lock as you can get. You're not going to have a reset on this one.”

“One pass should do it. Both
broadsides?”

“Both. And hit anything close to us in
passing as we go. Helm, once she's dust, corkscrew. Guns, toss chaff when we
begin to spin.” What she was proposing was using the ship's spin to cut down on
exposure on any one of her shield quadrants.

Energy weapons inflicted damage by a
simple formula of Energy applied, plus the density plus the rate of delivery.
In other words, if a beam was to do damage, it had to have enough of a punch or
it was worthless.

A part of that problem was the apertures
of a weapon. To do enough damage at a distance over a hundred kilometers a
laser had to have an aperture of a meter or wider and used nearly a gigawatt of
energy to do appreciable damage. Any range beyond a hundred kilometers and the
beam ran into diffraction issues, where the beam began to spread out, thus
negating it's damage ability. Lasers were considered hard killers, they
vaporized or did 'front door damage' to a target, melting it.

That was why most hand held energy
weapons were plasma based. It took a lot of juice to kill someone, which was
why capacitors were treated as magazines in hand held energy weapons.

There were seven different forms of
energy weapons mounted on a ship. Plasma weapons were common, but they were
short ranged, under a hundred kilometers and required force beams to steer and
contain them. Force beams were soft damage weapons, good for taking down
shields and inflicting wedge damage, but required massive amounts of power and
were again, short ranged.

Particle weapons were limited to Neutron
beams. The idea of charged particle beams had been disproven as an effective
weapon in the late twentieth century. The electrostatic repulsion of the beam
tended to create a massive divergence of the beam spread. Also the charged
particle beams were heavily influenced by magnetic and force shields.