It had been more than a month since their last gravity wave observation. Triangulation put that particular wave in a system nearly 200 light-years away, almost due galactic north from Brinks. It had been thrilling to realize that the stargate that had originated the wave had done so at a time when human beings were still struggling to get into space. Of course, that had been the last thrill she’d had.
Even her Saturday night dates were beginning to pall. For one thing, Henry Sortees was very debonair, but he was beginning to repeat his jokes, and his performance in bed was little better than adequate. It was a shame there wasn’t any new blood on the base. After four years of exile, even the talk of how many credits they were amassing back home had ended.
The problem was that no one knew how long it would be before they were relieved. Hell, she told herself, the Broa might have followed the expedition home and conquered Earth while they were stuck on this godforsaken airless rock of a moon. Perhaps no one would ever come to tell them that they could go home. Perhaps they had no home to return to!
In the meantime, the slow, unglamorous work of watching the sky continued. The contact the previous month had added a fifth confirmed Broan world to their list. Five worlds in four years. At this rate, Brinks would have a population the size of Earth’s by the time they finished their survey of the Sovereignty. That is, if the air plant and hydroponic gardens held out.
Life went on, to be sure. Approximately 40% of the original expedition’s rear guard had either married or taken up housekeeping in the interim, and two dozen children had been born. That, at least, was the bright side of life. Whenever Jennifer felt blue, she would walk to where the nursery-kindergarten had been set up.
There was something about the high pitched squeal of children’s voices that perked her up. She would watch the little darlings/barbarians chase each other around, oblivious to the fact that they were cut off from the rest of humanity, and smile. Often she became wistful, wishing for a child of her own. If only Henry were more skilled at the oldest of humanity’s sports, perhaps she would have considered a long term commitment and motherhood.
The opus ended in its usual crash of symbols and horns. She keyed her display and scanned the list of available music. Even that was getting old. How many times could one listen to the same symphony without becoming jaded to even the classics?
She glanced at the chronometer. Only 45 minutes left in this watch, after which she would adjourn to the commons and spend another evening watching holos she had seen five times before, or else join in one of the interminable bridge tournaments that never seemed to end.
She reached out to key her selection into the music list when a different sound enveloped her. From all around, the sound of alarms blared in her ears.
She blinked, and turned back to her main screen. On it was a bright red text box with the blinking words,
LASER DETECTED,
inside. There was also a coordinate indicating that the monochromatic light was coming from the sky in the direction of Earth. Her boredom suddenly forgotten, Jennifer keyed for analysis. The machine was still calculating when her comm unit buzzed.
“Observatory,” she snapped out, not taking her eyes from the screen.
“Powell,” came the reply. “What have you got?”
“A comm laser, sir,” she replied. “Definitely human.”
Her words were cut off by the resumption of the alarms. Absentmindedly, she keyed them to silence.
“A second comm laser, sir. And a third!”
Within a minute there were a dozen of them.
“Any messages yet?”
“Not yet. Just carrier waves. However, I think it safe to say that the fleet has arrived to relieve us.”
“Sounds like the only explanation,” her boss replied. “However, let’s not get anyone’s hope up until we know for sure. Study the situation and when you have an official message, make the announcement.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Powell, out.”
“Observatory out,” Jennifer replied. She turned back to her work. The comm lasers remained strangely silent, although she remembered that no message would be started until the ships on the other end were sure their beams had fallen on Brinks Base.
Then, as she was beginning to suspect something was wrong, the screens began to display messages. The first was the time of transmission and the name of the ship – virtually all of them strange to her – then the standard fleet greetings announcing arrival. Finally, there were several personal messages appended to the transmissions, mostly to the captains of the two vessels that had stayed behind.
Discovering that she had been holding her breath, Jennifer exhaled loudly and keyed Brinks’ response to the flood of incoming messages. The response was impersonal, giving the arriving ships approach information and a synopsis of what had happened in their absence.
Her duty done, Jennifer sat back and marveled as the number of comm lasers announcing ship arrivals continued to climb. “My God,” she thought, “they’ve brought everything, including the kitchen sink.”
Her mood was considerably buoyed half an hour later when she was relieved by Eric Powell, who was himself amazed at the number of ships breaking out of superlight.
“It’s an invasion!” he muttered as he scanned all of the identifications.
“If so, it’s a happy one,” Jennifer responded.
“Do you know what this means?” Powell asked, straightening up from where he had been hunched over the monitors.
“I do indeed,” Jennifer said, jumping up and hugging him. “It means we get to go home. In a little over a year from now, I will be frolicking in the surf at Waikiki!”
#
Chapter Twenty Four
Dan Landon smiled to himself as he sat in the command chair of Starship
Abraham Lincoln
and contemplated the fact that he never wanted to be anywhere else. Two years in command of a shipyard had taught him that he much preferred flying starships to building them. Despite his distaste for the construction end of the business, he had done a sufficiently good job that he had been inducted into the Space Navy, promoted to Fleet Admiral, and given command of the second expedition to Broan Space.
“Honest Abe”
was not itself a faux Broan design. While the New Mexico shipyard had been popping out fake Type Seven freighters, Type Two Transports, and Bulk Carriers, the Sahara shipyard had been building humanity’s first true interstellar warships.
The
Lincoln
was a blastship of the
Luis Ramirez
class, the second out of the cradle. Her armament consisted of lasers and particle beams powerful enough to melt another vessel at a thousand kilometers. Her magazines were stuffed with enough superlight missiles and warheads that she could raze a planet if need be.
There was nothing subtle about Dan Landon’s new command.
Lincoln
had been designed to take on the largest Broan ship of which humanity was aware. Hopefully, it would not come to that. The
Lincoln
’s current task was to remain out of sight and guard the Q-ships that would probe Broan worlds as the
Ruptured Whale
had probed Klys’kra’t. If everything went as planned, she would not show herself to the enemy for several years, and then only in the company of a hundred other vessels of equal or greater striking power.
“Honest Abe”
had been constructed on the simple principle: that bigger is better. As such, she represented a calculated risk. Each behemoth in her class was three times larger than their Broan adversaries, making them much too large to fit through a stargate. When humanity finally acquired stargate technology, they hoped to build them large enough for blastships. Otherwise, the main human striking force would have to cross the vastness of intra-galactic space the hard way.
Landon’s elevation to Fleet Admiral had put him in command of eighty ships of all types. Most were Q-ships. The fleet had formed up in Earth orbit over two hectic weeks while final touches were put on the new constructs. They had launched en masse. When the fleet was well past the orbit of Neptune, they had disappeared into the blackness of superlight.
It is the nature of superlight travel that each ship must make the voyage essentially alone. Vessels moving faster than light had no way to detect or communicate with one another. The only chance for outside contact came when the ships dropped sublight once each week to take their bearings.
Routes and breakout times were rigidly controlled in the hope that the fleet could maintain some semblance of order. However, space is so large that it was rare to catch sight of even one other vessel during the hour spent observing the universe before returning to superlight flight.
Even during the final breakout, when some eighty ships entered the Hideout System in practically the same microsecond, no two vessels were close enough to see one another. After 7000 light-years in transit, the fleet was scattered over half of Hideout’s northern celestial hemisphere.
While they made their slow way from the outer Hideout system toward Brinks, Landon had one particularly nagging worry. It had been more than a year since he had been able to tally his flock. How many had made it the full distance?
Fleet protocol called for Landon to wait 30 days before searching for stragglers. If any ships failed to appear by the deadline, he would launch a pair of Type Seven freighters to backtrack their route. Starships that experienced engine problems had orders to make for one of a dozen designated star systems in which to seek refuge. The Type Sevens would stop for three days in each of these refuges to scan for laser and radio emissions. Any ship that made it to a refuge sun had a slightly better than even chance of being detected and rescued, assuming they retained the ability to communicate. However, if they broke down in interstellar space and were unable to make the designated systems, they were irretrievably lost. There would be no way to find them in the vastness that lay between Sol and Hideout.
To Dan Landon’s immense relief, when everyone checked in, he discovered that his whole flock had successfully made the voyage.
#
“Admiral, welcome to Brinks Base,” Captain Hans Heinrich, base commander, said as he saluted. “Are we glad to see you!”
“I’ll bet you are,” Landon replied.
“Yes, sir. We were beginning to worry that you had forgotten us.”
“Not for a minute, Captain. We just had a lot to do before we could come back.”
“I see that, sir. I’ve never seen so many starships in my life. And there doesn’t seem to be a familiar name in the bunch.”
“No, they were all constructed over the past two years. We’ve got the shipyards programmed and the pipeline flowing. There will be a lot more where they came from. I suspect you will get command of something bigger when you get home. We owe you and your people a great deal for sticking it out here.”
“I hope you will have time to tell them yourself, Admiral.”
“I’ll make a point of it. How long do you think will be required to brief my people on what you have learned?”
“About ten minutes, sir. We will talk very, very quickly!”
Landon laughed. “I take it you are anxious to space for home.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m afraid we are going to have to keep you a bit longer, Hans. However, we won’t make it longer than we have to.”
“If you will come this way, Admiral, I’ll introduce you to my staff and give you a rundown on what we have been doing.”
“Lead on, Captain.”
As the two officers shuffled their way through Brinks Base, the only way to move quickly in the moon’s one-quarter gee, they passed a woman with a toddler in tow and a baby on her hip. She wore the uniform of a ship’s botanist. Landon smiled and nodded.
“Well, I can see one thing you have been doing!”
Heinrich nodded. “There is that, sir. We have had quite a little population explosion here on base.”
#
A dozen officers awaited them in what Landon remembered to be the base commissary. In his absence, it had taken on the ambience of someone’s oversize living room. As they entered, the officers drawn up in double file snapped to attention. Captain Heinrich began the introductions.
“Admiral, my second in command. Captain Gareth Cardozo, of
Vaterland.”
“Captain Cardozo.”
“Commander Marcos Severance, my executive officer. And Commander Jonas Barksdale, Captain Cardozo’s exec.”
“Commanders.”
“Lieutenant Jennifer Mullins, Astrogation and one of our base astronomers.”
“Lieutenant Mullins,” Landon said, nodding. “We are going to want to talk to you later.”
“Yes, sir. I’m ready.”
Heinrich continued down the line, introducing each officer in turn. Landon nodded and shook their hands. Having finished the introductions, Landon stood back and looked at each of them in turn before speaking. “Ladies and gentlemen, I want to thank all of you for your service. It has been long, lonely, and difficult. However, let me assure you that it has been worth it.
“My fleet and I have arrived to perform various reconnaissance missions within the Sovereignty and to obtain information vital to our war effort. We will perform these missions based on the information you have obtained in our absence. Rest assured that you have all of humanity behind you, and that you will receive a hero’s welcome when you return home.
“Please let your people know that it is my wish to get you into space within the week. That should give you enough time to pack your belongings, say your goodbyes, and to attend the blowout bash I am throwing for you.
“Also, let them know we have brought news recordings and summaries so that you can catch up on events Earthside… the important things — who is sleeping with who in Hollywood and what the latest fashions are like.”
The small joke received a polite laugh.
“Very well, don’t let me detain you. You are dismissed back to your duties or to your quarters. Lieutenant Mullins, please stay for a moment.”
The assembled officers filed out and disappeared in both directions along the corridor.
“Relax, Jennifer,” Landon said as he turned toward the lieutenant.