Alarm of War, Book II: The Other Side of Fear (3 page)

She found her in a utility room in the back of the building.  MacLeod and two of his cronies had Martha on the floor.  They had already ripped off her tunic and bra and were pulling off her pants.  MacLeod was slapping her and telling her that she really wanted this.  Martha was weeping and cursing and as terrified as she had ever been in her life.

Douthat charged in. (Much later she admitted that it would have been smarter to call for help first, but that hadn’t occurred to her in the heat of the moment.)  She kicked one of the men in the face, shoved another one and launched herself at MacLeod.  The element of surprise gave her a moment’s advantage, but three-to-one odds abruptly overcame it. One of the two cronies grabbed her from behind and MacLeod punched her several times in the face.  They tossed her into the corner and went back to Wilkinson, now naked and bleeding.  MacLeod undid his pants, thrust her legs apart and knelt down.

He ignored Douthat; she was down, no longer a threat.

Down, but not out.  She spat out a tooth and struggled to her feet.  There was a bottle of bleach on the shelf.  She opened it, then threw it into MacLeod’s face.  He threw back his head and shrieked in agony as the bleach scorched his eyes.  Then she grabbed a broom handle and swung it viciously at the nearer of the other two men, missing by a good foot.  Martha told her later that she was screeching like a banshee, but Douthat was oblivious to everything except the overwhelming, primordial need to hurt them.  Kill them, if she could. 

Sheer rage doesn’t always even out poor odds either, however, and after a moment’s stunned hesitation, the two men were on her, beating her to the ground and kicking her.  She bit one on the leg and was rewarded with a kick to the head.  She squirmed sideways and kicked one of them in the knee, which gave a very satisfying ‘crunch’ sound. 

The third man was just about to kick her again when the door burst open and four more Academy cadets poured in, took in the situation and subdued MacLeod and his friends by beating them senseless.

Douthat spent a week in the med pod.  On top of a concussion, her jaw was broken and she was missing two teeth. Her knuckles were cracked and swollen.  One eye had healed well, but the other was still swollen shut.  Her nose, never pretty to begin with, was pushed flat against her face and would require surgery. 

When she arrived back at the Academy she was met by the Academy Provost.  “I thought you might be interested to know that MacLeod and his two thugs are in jail and will be for a few years,” he told her.  Douthat grunted something in reply, unable to speak very well with her jaw wired shut.

The Provost studied her for a moment, his look not unkindly.  “I’ve taken the liberty of changing your Fleet Track from Engineering to Command School, Douthat,” he told her.   “You were an idiot to take on three of them like that, but I saw what you did to them before they knocked you down.  At Command School we can teach people how not to be idiots, but it’s hard to find a good fighter.”

At the dorm, Martha Wilkinson met her arm-in-arm with one of the four cadets who had come to their rescue.  His name was Albert Hanaway and she married him two years later.  They were married for twenty six years and had four daughters before he died from heart problems, in his own home, surrounded by his family.

And so the acts of a violent bully and rapist led Wilkinson to meet her future husband and started Alyce Douthat down the path that eventually led to her becoming Admiral of the Home Fleet at the time of Victoria’s gravest hour.

“To the Law of Unintended Consequences,” Douthat echoed softly, raising her glass.

Wilkinson stood up.  “Time for me to go.  Pay attention to that report, Alyce, don’t sit on it.  And make sure that Tuttle girl gets some time off.”

Douthat grimaced.  “I’m never going to get any sleep tonight.”

Wilkinson smiled sweetly.  “Oh, I think you will.  I spiked your wine.”  And laughing, she left.

Chapter 2

H.M.S.
Laughing Owl

On Station above Timor in Dominion Sector

              The H.M.S.
Laughing Owl
rode in synchronous orbit 25,000 miles above the main military spaceport of Timor.  Behind the ship ran a 200-mile towed sensor array, laden with passive sensors that vacuumed up visual, radio and other electromagnetic data from the space port and the entire area around it.

              The
Laughing Owl
was one of twenty Visby-Class corvettes, named after the Swedish stealth warships built on Old Earth and considered by many to be the most successful stealth craft of its time. But while the Fleet officially called them ‘Visby-Class corvettes,’ everyone who flew in them affectionately called them ‘Owls.’ Half the size of a destroyer, its hull and decks were made entirely of sensor-baffling composites; it had three Royce antimatter engines large enough to power a cruiser and an inertial compensator more powerful than anything else in the Fleet. It could accelerate like a bat out of hell.

              The rest of the vessel was crammed with the most cutting-edge passive sensors Victorian technology could devise.  It was not armored and carried no weapons, but had a large supply of reconnaissance drones and courier drones.  The Visby-Class corvettes were designed for one thing and one thing only: spying without getting caught, and at that they excelled.  The corvettes were typically assigned missions that lasted up to six months, though it was not unheard of for a ship to be out for nine months or longer because it either found something that required longer surveillance or it had to skulk about at a wormhole for weeks, waiting for a time it could transit without being detected.  It had a crew of eleven who lived in cabins carefully placed as far apart from each other as possible to give the crew some measure of privacy, and allowed for some discrete nocturnal visits from cabin to cabin that the psychologists said were an absolute necessity on a long mission.  All of the crews were carefully selected to be a balanced mix of males and females, all roughly the same age.  In addition to being skilled at their various jobs, the crew members were carefully screened for three critical personality traits: the ability to be in close quarters with other people for months at a time; a sense of humor; and patience. A spy ship might loiter for weeks or months in search of one piece of critical data, all the while at risk of imminent discovery. Spy ships fought a different type of war, one that required maturity and the ability to cope with prolonged stress. Not surprisingly, the average age of a spy corvette crew was almost ten years older than on a regular warship.

              “Any more word from Fleet?” Sadia Zahiri asked her Communications Officer.

              “Nothing, Captain,” Dennie Hod replied crisply.  He looked up, almost shyly.  “Do you think they made it through to Refuge, Captain?”  It had been seven weeks since the last message. 

              Sadia kept her voice cheerful.  “Oh, I wouldn’t worry too much about that, Dennie.  They had the entire Home Fleet to protect them and a running head start.  They made it, alright, but getting word out of Refuge and through two wormholes to let us know, well, that’s going to take a ship, not just a courier drone.”  The courier drones could reliably go through the gravity tides of one wormhole, but rarely survived two.

              This brought her to her next big decision.  She had ten spy ships under her command in the Dominion Sector.  The
Laughing Owl
was sitting on the Herzberg Space Port, adjacent to Timor’s largest military base, while the other nine Owls formed a large net around Timor, able to monitor any space traffic in or out of the planet.  The problem was there hadn’t been any for weeks.  The last significant movement had been a fleet of roughly eighty ships that set out for the Victorian wormhole seven weeks earlier.  Then had come a wave of freighters from Victoria, blaring news of the Dominion’s invasion.

              The news had left them thunderstruck.  Victoria had been defeated in a surprise attack by Dominion and Tilleke forces!  Queen Anne was leading the survivors to Refuge – Anne?  What happened to Queen Beatrice?

              Since then, nothing.

              Now Sadia had to decide whether to send one of her Owls on a long and dangerous mission to Refuge to establish contact with the rest of the Fleet.  But she didn’t really have any choice – they were almost out of food.  The Owls had been stocked for seven months and they were in the sixth month of their mission.  She had cut rations once and would cut them again, but the fact was in eight weeks, nine at the outside, they were going to run out.

              As she thought about it more, she decided that she would send two Owls to Refuge, not one.  She could take most of their remaining food and distribute it among the Owls that would stay behind, giving each of them an additional four days on reduced rations.  Maybe.  After that it would get ugly.

              “Captain!  Got a ship coming out of Herzberg.”  It was Fatima Binissa, one of the three Sensors Officers.

              “Beacon?”

              “Yes, Ma’am.  Says it’s the Dominion Ship
Tartarus.
  She’s big, maybe a million tons.  Just moseying along, pulling thirty gravities.”

              Sadia frowned. 
Tartarus?
  Where had she heard that name before?  “Merlin!”

              “Captain?”

              “Dominion vessel
Tartarus.
  Give specifics.”

              “The Dominion vessel
Tartarus
was commissioned in P.D. 930 at the Might of the People Ship Works as a jumbo freighter, but was never used for that purpose.  On order of the Dominion Intelligence Directorate, the vessel was converted into a prison ship and has been used since that time to house political prisoners considered too sensitive to keep on the Dominion planet Timor.  The
Tartarus
has a maximum acceleration of-“

              “Stop!” Sadia ordered. Political prisoners? Huh.  She rubbed her cheek slowly.  What other types of prisoners might be on board?  Would she be heading for Cornwall to pick up high ranking officials who had been captured?

              “Escorts?”

              “None that I see, Captain,” Binissa replied.  “But they must feel pretty safe this deep in Dominion space, so it’s hard to draw any conclusion from that.”

              Fair point, Sadia mused.  “Okay, Fatima, will she go through Orbital Control?”

              Binissa nodded.  “She should reach Timor Orbital Control in forty minutes, announce her destination and be given clearance.”

              “Dennie, set it up.  I want audio and video of any communications between
Tartarus
and the OC.”

              Dennie Hod brought up a control screen and began to type in commands.  “Shouldn’t be a problem, Captain.”  They had already positioned a stealth reconnaissance drone two thousand miles beyond the Orbital Control space station.  As directed by Hod, it turned its sensitive passive array to lock onto the Tartarus.

              Forty-three minutes later they had it.

              “
Orbital Control, this is Tartarus, DID 3941-545, requesting clearance for Destination Code Alpha 3-100-X.”

              “Control to DID 3941-545, you are cleared for
Siegestor.  Good voyage.”

              “Merlin!  Search for ‘Destination Code Alpha 3-100-X’ and search for ‘Siegestor.’”

Sadia sat back, expecting Merlin’s usual immediate reply.  Five seconds passed, then ten.  Her eyebrows rose.  Finally the AI responded.  “Captain, there is nothing in any Victorian data bank to which I have access regarding either ‘Destination Code Alpha 3-100-X’ or ‘Siegestor.’  However, my database is one hundred and seventy nine days out of date.  I would recommend that-“

              “Stop!”  So, where the hell was Siegestor?  And why was a DID prison ship going there?

              “Ah, Captain?” Binissa said, and the touch of urgency in her voice made Sadia look at her sharply.  “The
Tartarus
isn’t turning towards the Victorian wormhole; she’s turning away, towards deep space.”

              Sadia checked the holo.  If the plane of advance was a line extending directly from Timor to the Victorian wormhole, with the wormhole as ‘North,’ the
Tartarus
was headed due ‘South.’  “Merlin, what is south of Timor within sixty days at normal military cruising speed?”

              “Captain, there are two asteroid fields, the first approximately twenty days travel from this point, the second approximately fifty days travel from this point.  Neither one has been mapped or charted.  There are no known mining facilities or other man-made structures.  However, my database is one hundred and seventy nine days out of date.  During that time it-“

              “Stop.”  Sadia wondered idly if the computer would ever shut up if she didn’t command it to.

              So why send political prisoners to empty space?  Frowning, she turned back to her Sensors Officer.  “Fatima, let’s put an ELF on the ship.”  Binissa raised an eyebrow, but bent to comply.  Sadia understood the woman’s caution, but it was an acceptable risk. 
Tartarus
was still in its home sector; it would not be expecting – or hopefully monitoring for – any probes or unusual occurrences.  And the ELF frequency range simply wasn’t used very much except by scientific survey ships, and the
Tartarus
certainly wasn’t one of those. The risk of discovery was minimal.

Soon the narrowly focused, extremely low frequency pulse reached out to the
Tartarus
, unheard and unseen by everyone on board.  Sadia kept her eyes locked on the holo display, now magnified so that the prison ship almost filled it.  She didn’t really expect anything, but it never hurt to be sure.  She waited for five heartbeats, then ten, then twenty.  Nothing.  She began to relax.  Well, no surprise-

Bing…Bing…

Sadia and Fatima Binissa both lurched forward, peering urgently at the holo.  Two red dots appeared in the mid-section of the
Tartarus
, glowed for several seconds, and then faded into nothingness.  Sadia felt the blood drain from her face.  Binissa looked stunned.

There were two Victorian prisoners on the Dominion prison ship.

Bugger me!
Sadia thought.  “Merlin!  Analyze data from the ELF probe and identify the Victorian personnel onboard the Dominion ship
Tartarus!”

“LRR beacons identify them as Sergeant Maria Sanchez, Fleet Marine attached to the H.M.S.
Yorkshire
on special assignment and Private Otto Wisnioswski, Fleet Marine, attached to the H.M.S.
Yorkshire
on special assignment.  Sanchez is twenty four years old, a native of-“

“Stop.”   What were those poor bastards doing on a Dominion prison ship, and where the hell were they going? And more importantly, what could she do about it?