Rumors of Salvation (System States Rebellion Book 3) (13 page)

Molitor
smiled at Ernst’s sudden realization that he was no longer talking with a peer
but rather with his superior officer. Yeager’s willingness to acknowledge her
authority would go a long way to convincing his crew and the others back at the
Base to do the same. The question she now had to face was what should they do
next? It would take months before the shipyard had another ship ready, and that
was only part of the problem. Murphy had already scraped the bottom of the
barrel in terms of finding qualified volunteers for Phantom. There was a limit
on how many of the shipyard people could be reassigned as crew without
negatively impacting the shipyard’s ability to build new ships, and she
suspected they had reached that limit already. At least she had plenty of time
to ponder that question on the way back.

Day
275/2554

Coral
Sea

Midgard
orbital space

Drake
noticed how quiet the Bridge had gotten since they emerged from their final
micro-jump. The usual good-natured banter was gone now. Everyone realized that
it was time to get serious about their mission. Drake had been scratching his
head over the question of how to find the Resistance during the trip here.

If
the Resistance had managed to avoid detection by the Empire, how could he find
them? The key had to be Midgard’s moon. The metals and other materials needed
to build ships could only be obtained easily and perhaps secretly on that moon.
If he could locate where the mining operation was, perhaps he could convince
the people manning that facility that he was not an enemy. It would take a
couple of hours to drop down to a low altitude over the moon, and Coral Sea
hadn’t even started down. Before he committed the ship to that course of
action, he wanted to be sure that there weren’t any ships waiting in ambush. He
got up and walked over to the Detection/ECM Station.

“Any
signs of other ships?” he asked.

“Nothing
so far, Sir.”

“Is
the gear working properly?” asked Drake. The new detection system was a finicky
piece of equipment that had to be constantly monitored. While the principle of
detecting ripples in the Ether caused by the movement of something as massive
as a jump-capable spaceship was proven and tested, they sometimes still had
difficulty distinguishing between natural ripples and man-made ones.

“I
just checked, Sir. The diagnostics say it’s working fine.”

“Any
emissions from either the moon or the planet?” asked Drake.

“Nothing
from the moon. We’re picking up typical civilian radio and video traffic from
Midgard. Unless the Resistance is talking in code, it’s just the locals
chatting, Sir.”

After
thinking about that, Drake said, “Okay. I’m going to order Helm to take us into
the hyper-zone. Let’s get the ECM warmed up now, and I want you to turn it on
as soon as we cross into the zone. Got it?”

“Got
it, Sir,” said the young officer confidently.

As
Drake walked back to his Command Station, he once again reminded himself that
the new Electronic Counter-Measures gear really did work in spite of the
difficulty of spoofing any radar beams and masking any energy that would
normally reflect off Coral Sea’s smooth, spherical hull. The combination of
Ether ripple detection and ECM cloaking should allow Coral Sea to evade any
approaching ship long enough to break out of the hyper-zone and micro-jump
away.

“Okay,
Helm, let’s go take a close look at that moon and take your time. I’m not in a
hurry.” The H.O.s acknowledgement did nothing to relieve Drake’s doubts about
the risks he was making his crew take, but they were risks that had to be
taken.

Two
hours thirty-four minutes later:

Drake
shifted his gaze (away) from the main display. Watching the zoomed-in image of
the moon’s surface rapidly scrolling past for long periods of time was starting
to give him a headache. Visual monitoring was worth doing, but not a necessity.
It was hard to imagine any kind of mining, smelting or manufacturing activity
that did not generate some kind of tell-tale heat, light or gaseous emissions.
Those would be detected by the ship’s passive sensors, and physical movement
would be detected by the ship’s opticals, which were being monitored by
computer.

“That
must have been the old SSU complex site,” said the Helm Officer suddenly. Drake
looked back just in time to see a series of overlapping, rather large and deep
craters, each with a ring of unusually sharp-looking rocky debris, move out of
visual range.
My God, those poor bastards really got hammered.
That
attack had been carried out by Trojan’s minions in his pre-Empire days. That
meant they still considered themselves to be Federation forces, at least
nominally. The fact that he, Drake, was now considering allying himself and the
Brain Trust with former Federation personnel seemed quite bizarre. For a split
second he was tempted to order the ship to turn around and head back to
Excalibur, but he didn’t.

They
finally picked up signs of unusual activity 13 minutes later. Drake ordered the
ship to hover over that point and drop down even closer. The local sun was low
on the horizon, generating long shadows which made it difficult to see anything
out of the ordinary. Drake ordered a lidar scan. Reflections from the
low-powered laser would generate a perfect image of the hidden surface.

“Ah…what
have we got here?” asked Drake in satisfied tone. The computer-generated image
showed a large opening in the wall of a crater. Not big enough for a ship to
enter, but certainly big enough for heavy equipment to bring loads of ore or
perhaps even refined metals to the surface for loading onto a ship. He turned
to his Com Tech.

“Okay,
Mandy, let’s start sending the pre-recorded greeting on a repeating loop. If
there’s someone down there, they’re bound to be monitoring radio frequencies.”

After
waiting an hour, Drake was beginning to have doubts that there really was
something underground. Could it just be a natural cave he wondered. He needed
to be sure, so he ordered a couple of the crew to take a shuttle down, land beside
the opening and explore the cave. Coral Sea would continue to hover over the
site while the ground search took place. It didn’t take long for the two men to
be standing at the cave entrance.

“We’re
ready to enter the cave, Coral Sea. Be prepared to lose our signal.”

“Understood.
You’re cleared to proceed, Sanchez,” said Drake.

“Okay,
we’re heading in.” Drake heard their breathing and knew the com channel was
still open. After a few seconds, Sanchez spoke. “Well, sir, I can tell you that
this cave is manmade. The floor has gotten VERY smooth, and the tunnel isn’t
round anymore. It’s rectangular with vertical sides. The question is…”

The
rest of the sentence was drowned out with static. Drake cursed the overhead
rock that was blocking the signal from the spacesuit transmitters worn by the
two men. He waited, hoping the men would remember their instructions to return
within five minutes, regardless of what they did or didn’t find, if
communications were cut off. When the five minutes were just about up, the
static started to give way to human speech.

“Sea…can
you…me? We’re returning to the shuttle. Can you hear me, Coral Sea?”

“We
can hear you now, Sanchez? What did you find?” asked a relieve Drake.

“Robotic
mining equipment. We saw several of them moving around. No signs of any human
operators or even that provisions for human operators were made. We both think
this whole underground installation is robotic.” Sanchez sounded a bit out of
breath or perhaps a little bit shaken up by what he saw.

“Good
job, both of you. Get back here asap. Drake clear.” As he leaned back in his
chair, he wondered what to do next. Apparently that robotic mining operation
wasn’t monitoring radio traffic. If it had been, then surely there would have
been a response of some kind. Even if his signals had been relayed to Midgard,
there had been plenty of time for either a radioed reply or a visit by some
kind of spacecraft. Somebody had to be in charge of this facility. Robotic
mining operations didn’t set themselves up. He supposed that it might be
possible for the owners to be from another star system, making the occasional
visit by a spaceship. But that only made sense if they were from a nearby star
system with relatively short travel times, and as far as he knew, there were no
other star systems with habitable planets within 34 light years. It was far
more likely that this facility was being run by and for somebody on Midgard
itself.

When
the shuttle was back onboard, he ordered the ship to head for Midgard. The main
colony center was just on the verge of slipping behind the planet’s horizon
from the moon’s point of view. Coral Sea would take a curving path that always
kept the colony in sight, just in case a spacecraft took off or landed. While
the ship’s new detection gear could spot ships as far away as a full light
minute, it couldn’t detect ripples in the Ether if a planet were in between,
except at close range. Drake wasn’t worried about being detected. Even if the
colony was sending radar beams out into space, which it wasn’t, Coral Sea’s ECM
equipment would trick the radar into ‘seeing’ nothing. He was still debating
whether Coral Sea would actually land at the colony spaceport. Even though the
ship had started life as a freighter, it no longer looked like one after being
modified to carry missile boats externally. Even a casual visual inspection
would recognize that this was no ordinary freighter, so there was no sense in
pretending that it was. The other factor to consider was that the ship would be
very vulnerable to attack if it was on the ground. An idea occurred to him. He
got up and stepped over to the Helm station.

“Sir?”
asked the H.O.

“How
close would we have to get to the planet to be able to see a shipbuilding
complex visually?” asked Drake.

“Ah,
our optics are pretty good. I’d say a couple of hundred kilometers, assuming
that there’s no cloud cover, Sir.”

“If
we brought the ship that close over the main Colony city, would they be able to
see us?”

“Well,
we’d be reflecting some sunlight if we did that while the colony was on the
daylight side, but I doubt if anyone would be able to tell that it was a ship
causing the reflection with the naked eye or even with binoculars. If we
hovered over them at night, they wouldn’t see a thing and neither would we,”
said the H.O. with a laugh. Drake laughed too. It was a good coincidence that
they arrived here while it was still daylight over the colony. He was just
about to ask another question when the main displayed pinged for attention. A
computer-generated text message scrolled across the bottom of the display.

[Two
ships have emerged from hyper-space]

Drake
and the H.O. both looked at the tactical display. A yellow icon, indicating
unknown Friend or Foe, with the number 2 beside it, appeared near the edge of
Midgard’s hyper-zone, roughly a third of the way around the planet from where
Coral Sea was. As he continued to watch, the sidebar data updated with
approximate vector and speed. With the projected trajectory showing, it didn’t
take long to realize that the two ships were headed for Midgard, but NOT for
the main colony city.

Drake
nodded to the Helm Officer and moved over to the Astrogation Station. “Put
their projected destination up on the main display, please,” he said.

“Coming
up, Skipper.” Within two seconds, the main display zoomed in to the opposite
side of the continent from where the colony city was. It just happened to be on
the side of the planet that was still visible to Coral Sea.

“Do
we know what’s down there?” asked Drake.

The
A.O. shook his head. “Our planetary database isn’t that complete, and we’re
still too far away for our optics to get a good look.”

“Well
in that case, we’ll just wait until they land and then take a close look.”
Turning to look back at the Helm Officer, Drake said, “Helm, slow us down. I
want those ships to get there before we do.”
I hope Murphy’s on one of those
ships,
he thought.

Tigershark

Molitor
watched the view from one of the ship’s external cameras as the ship descended
through Midgard’s atmosphere. She was nervous, and she didn’t think it was
caused by the uncertainty of the response of the Base personnel to her
assumption of authority. Yeager had reaffirmed his support for her and told her
his crew accepted her too, so it was unlikely that the Base personnel would
reject her. No, it was something else that was bothering her, and she didn’t
know what it was. It almost felt like intuition was warning her that something
unexpected was about to happen. She hated moments like this. The surprise was
usually a negative one.

“Commander,
I’m picking up a microwave transmission from off planet and it’s addressed to
Commander Bret Murphy,” said the Com Technician. Molitor was so shocked that
she was speechless for several seconds.

“Let’s
hear the message.”