Hunter Legacy 5 Hail the Hero (12 page)

Just before we reached the jump point, we
slowed. Camel and Starman launched, ran ahead of us, and jumped. I guess Greer
had been ordered to be point man as well. Made sense though, we were in
American space, so American military could order people around better than my
people could.

“Feed coming through from
Starman,” said Jane.

A screen popped up showing a spit screen of
Greer and some civilian pilot. The civilian was arguing he didn’t believe there
was a fleet coming through. Kansas hadn’t seen a fleet in his lifetime, so why
would there be one now? In any case, he was here first, he had right of way.

I checked the scanner. We were almost right
on top of the jump point.

“Tell Greer to let him jump,” I
said. “Hold the channel. I want to see this bozo’s face after he jumps.
Let Greer and Lacey see it too.”

“Confirmed.”

A medium freighter jumped in ahead of us. I
thought he had less than thirty seconds to change course before he crashed into
my shields.

His face when he realized his mistake was
priceless. A combination of stark terror, and total disbelief. It took him twenty
seconds to do anything except gape, and five seconds more to violently change
course.

His ship bounced off BigMother’s left front
shield. His shields failed, and there was a spray of metal for a few seconds,
as my shields eroded his hull. As far as I could determine, he didn’t have a
hull breach, but he’d come damned close.

I opened a voice only channel.

“Admiral Hunter to unknown ship. The
next time you’re told to give way to a military convoy, don’t be so bloody
stupid! You got lucky. You could have died right there and then, and it
wouldn’t have damaged my ship in the slightest. Now, do you need
assistance?”

The voice that came back was suitably awed.

“Sorry Admiral. No, I won’t need
assistance. The only permanent damage was to my underwear. Sorry to have
inconvenienced you.”

I closed the channel, and had a good laugh.

A few minutes later, Greer sent through the
all clear, and BigMother jumped. I opened a channel to both ships.

“Commanders, perhaps you better move
ahead of us for the rest of the trip. It might be better to warn civilians
further ahead of time, so any more stupid idiots can do the wrong thing without
coming to grief.”

They both acknowledged, and the channel
closed. The two Corvettes moved off at top speed. I could see from the scanner
there was traffic up ahead, heading our way, so warning them to stay clear of
us was probably a good idea.

I needed to think about this anyway. If I
was going to tootle around the galaxy in a ship this size, I’d need to make
sure unwary civvies didn’t crash and burn on us every time we jumped.

One of the interesting things about jumping
was no-one ever collided during the jump process. But on either side of the
jump point was another matter. The larger you were, the more likely something
might jump into you. Collisions were rare, but they did happen. It kept salvage
operators in business.

Like as not, I was going to need some
pilots for point duties all the time now. The Camel however, was an ideal ship
for the job. Big enough to scare off the average stupid, but small enough they
weren’t at risk of collision themselves. Well, not more than the average
freighter was.

The fleet jumped through behind us, and we
formed up again.

The next jump point was seven hours away
now. There was no point in me staying on the Bridge.

“Jane, can you take me down to my
living room please.”

“Sure.”

“Angel, want a ride?”

She leapt up from her pad, raced down her
ramp and waited at the bottom.

Jane gently lifted me, and set me down in
the grav chair. Angel shinned up my right leg, and sat in my lap, purring away.
I started patting her.

I was pushed to the access shaft, and we
gently wafted down a level, where Jane swung the chair onto Deck Two.

Inside my suite, she lowered me into a
lounge chair, Angel riding me down, and propped my leg up on a foot
pouffe.

Jeeves had a ginger ale on the table next to me before I was
in any way comfortable.

I was still getting comfortable as the room began to fill
up. Aline switched on the entertainment unit, and the next episode of ‘Who’
began to play.

Two hours later, I called Jeeves for a pain
shot. I’d done well not moving until then, but Angel jumped back onto my lap
after doing the rounds of the room, and hit a bruised area. My flinch made her
jump straight off, and reminded me I was overdue for a shot.

Jeeves came over and gave it to me, and
then stood there looking at me.

“Will you be lunching here, my
Lord?”

Darius choked on his drink. I hadn’t even
noticed he and Chet had come in. The floor of the room was draped in people,
and the two Admirals had been given chairs. There seemed to be more chairs than
I normally had as well.

“The Admirals and I will be dining in
my Dining Room, the rest will be moving downstairs.”

Aline hit the pause with a loud sigh, and
everyone except the Admirals, rose and trooped out.

Jane helped me into my grav chair, making
me look a bit more mobile than I really was. She pushed me into the Dining Room,
and removed a chair to give mine room at the table. The Admirals joined me.

Jeeves had us eating in nothing flat. I
wasn’t hungry still, and only picked at my food, eating very little of it.

“My Lord?” asked Darius with a
smile on his face.

“The butlers are set to a British
setting. They all call me that. My station AI does as well, and she won’t stop
no matter what I say.”

They both laughed.

Chet started the ball rolling.

“Just how are you out of the hospital
Jon? I honestly don’t understand why they let you leave.”

“What makes you think they did?”
I responded with a grin.

Grins weren’t hurting me anymore. I still
had a yellow temple area, but it wasn’t reacting to facial movements now.

“How then?”

Darius looked like he wanted an answer as
well.

“They gave me a shot which put me to
sleep for ten hours. When I woke, Jane told me they planned to keep me under
for a week. Having already lost a week several months ago, I wasn’t keen to do
it again. I had her buy this chair for me, and she pushed me out. Basically, I
did a midnight flit.”

“Why didn’t they stop you?” asked
Darius.

I switched my suit to chameleon mode, and
vanished.

Both of them looked shocked for an instant,
before getting hold of themselves, and I switched back into ‘slinky red’.

“How did you do that?” asked
Darius, with a touch of incredulity in his voice.

“Suit programming. One of my people
was dabbling with it when I first met him, and when I asked him if the suit
could do a chameleon mode, we found it did. In the hospital, all they saw was
an orderly pushing an empty chair around. Once outside, Jane shifted into a
security uniform. I stayed hidden until we were back on the ship.”

The two of them exchanged glances.

“Yes,” I said, “the
applications of that are many and varied. We use the suits for far more than
clothes and basic protection, but this was the first time I used it to hide. I
may do it a lot more in the future. In fact, it gives me a few ideas I should’ve
thought of a long time ago.”

“Wouldn’t you be better off in
hospital?” asked Chet.

“Probably, but I have a state of the
art medical bay, which should be able to keep me functional. And I sent Jane
off shopping for a few things which should make life easier.”

“You amaze me Jon,” said Darius,
“you really do. I’ve heard the stories, but perhaps you would be so kind
as to tell us your background. Where did all this strategic and tactical
brilliance come from?”

I sighed, and launched into a little of the
family history.

“Those Hunters?” said Chet
suddenly. “No wonder. I’ve heard of military dynasties which breed the
occasional military genius, but your family has a history which few others
match. Not so much military, as space smarts, you could call it. Looks like you
inherited the best your family has ever offered down the centuries.”

Darius nodded, as if something suddenly
made sense for him.

I went on with my early background,
building my own computers and simulators, playing every space based computer
game I could. They nodded more and more often as I went on.

“So what did happen to you yesterday
Jon?” asked Darius. “The real story this time. I emailed with my
daughter who is science fiction mad, and she not only confirmed what your Eric
said as possible, she wanted to know who the shadowy figures were, and if you
saw them clearly enough to identify them?”

I looked at them both.

“It was pretty much as I said. I
passed out from the pain, and found myself in my Ready Room. I was shown the
events unfolding with what I assumed was my body, and had a conversation with
two entities, one of whom I know has been communicating with me for years
now.”

“What sort of entities? Are we talking
Egyptian god’s type entities? Or do you mean Jesus or Elvis?”

I laughed. Six hundred years after his
death, the conspiracy theorists still hadn’t concluded if Elvis was really dead
or not. Or even if he’d been human.

“Not Egyptian gods, but along those
lines.”

“Is this something to do with your
spiritual upbringing?” asked Chet.

“Everything actually. One of the
entities talks to me like you do, inside my head, and makes me think about
things I’d otherwise miss. I learned never to ignore that voice.”

“What’s with the claim of time
travel?” asked Darius.

“That one I have no clue about. But
did you play games at some time in your lives?” They both nodded.
“Well it felt like when you die in the game, and have to reload a previous
save in order to start again. It’s like it took three goes to get something
right. How it happened is anyone’s guess. Returning the second time threw me
against a wall so hard, I still can’t use my left arm fully. And it wasn’t just
me, there were three of us involved.”

“No rational explanation at all?”

“None. Maybe the closest is a ghost
tipped us out of our chairs.”

I grinned at them, and they laughed.

“The thing is though, it wasn’t just
three people, but also three Dropships. After the first time, I checked them
out, and they had logged programming done on them an hour and half after we
checked. I can’t explain that either.”

“As someone put it,” said Chet,
“you’re just a weird magnet Jon.”

The laughs continued. Lunch went back to
generalities after that, for which I was relieved.

The Admirals went off to do some work in
one of the offices, and I settled where I was, continuing on with emails.

Alison pinged me to ask about spa time, and
I told her after dinner. For now, I’d have a hard time getting in and out, even
with Jane doing it for me.

Both Bob and Walter had sent ‘glad to hear
you’re still with us’ emails. I let them know some of the details, but told
them I had no real idea of what happened, just that it had. I asked Bob if he
still had a clone of Jane around, and if so, to use it to encrypt his emails
from now on. If he didn’t, he was to email my station, and ask for a ship to
return to supply him a copy of Jane.

Maybe I was late to the paranoia party, but
as they say, better late than never. I should’ve done this a long time ago. If
someone was reading Walter’s emails, they would have known my movements for all
the time before the Door into the Australian sector was closed, and after it
opened again. It was somewhere to start anyway, in hunting down the mystery
assailant, assuming it wasn’t Santiago spitting at me from beyond the grave. It
was the most likely explanation, but my new state of paranoia demanded we check
it out as completely as possible.

Several invoices came in from Jane’s
shopping expedition, and I paid them without looking at them.

I sent an email to the Avon ‘tool man’,
asking him to send me an encryption key. It came back a few minutes later, so I
sent him the details of what had happened, how I’d merged three fully boosted
suits, and how the suit had pushed me two meters into the air. I asked him how
he was coming with dealing with the hits themselves, given how badly bruised I
was now. I suggested he look at how the suit composed itself when it went into
protection mode, and if he could change it so it was more like a combat suit in
terms of solid protection. It seemed to me the biggest flaw was its skin
hugging nature, when things hit it. If it was more like armour, the hit
wouldn’t get to the skin until the armour was worn away. If there was an energy
reflecting surface on it as well, the energy could be reflected before it hit
solidly enough to affect the person underneath. In theory.