Sol (The Silver Ships Book 5) (35 page)

Cordelia considered the problem of asteroids striking the derelicts. There would be no time for the pilots, with their human reflexes, to respond to an imminent impact. So she adopted her previous concept by requesting that Mickey tag the derelict ships with transponders. She updated the fleet’s traveler controllers with the frequencies of the new transponders and added an evasion routine. When the controller received a proximity warning, it would pull the traveler out of the asteroid shell before impact.

Woo and Chong were surprised to get Alex’s request for access to a credit stream, as he called it. Alex was being polite. He could have had Julien transfer the funds. The leaders gave their approval, wondering just what the Haraken president was up to and hoping that it would be something that would successfully counter Portland’s fleet.

“Nikki, I’ve set up a station account for you under the title ‘Rocks,’” Alex said and heard her giggle. “It seemed an appropriate name, at the time,” Alex said, laughing at himself.

“How much is in the account and what is it for?” Nikki asked.

“You’ll be hiring all the help we need, anything to do with the preparations for this fight.”

“Mr. President,” Yun interrupted, “who might we consider recipients of these credits?”

“Anyone reasonable and any amount that is seen as market price … stationers, miners, ore haulers, freighters, reclamation ships, even yachts if they’re serving a purpose.”

“How much money is in this account?” Nikki asked, looking it up in her finance application. “None,” she said, confused.

“It doesn’t work that way, Nikki. Just enter the amount, the payee, and service notes. The account is linked to one of Tribune Woo’s primary accounts. The debit will be replaced with a credit from her account. Any problems with it let me know.”

While Nikki was trying to process access to an almost limitless account as far as a station director was concerned, Yun had a practical concern. “Mr. President, we could add an enormous amount of debit to this account, practically bankrupting the station, before the transfer of credits from Earth arrives weeks later.”

“Negative, Captain, the transfers are accomplished through our probes. They will be real time. When this fight is over, you will have some time until we leave your space to process any late charges.”

When Alex closed the comm, Nikki and Yun grinned at each other. Nikki contacted Cordelia, per Alex’s instructions, for the ship placement and the type of ships she preferred. Yun commed the refining stations and told them he was borrowing their derelict hulks. Most objections were overcome when Yun explained that the cost of transport from the graveyards to the station and back would be at Idona’s expense. Any other objections were silenced when Yun added that the Haraken president ordered the transfer.

Finally, the SADEs pronounced the plan feasible and distributed the extensive requirements to the databases of the fleet and the station.

After spending most of the night reviewing the plan’s details with Yun, Nikki arranged a conference comm with the mining concerns in the belt for first thing in the morning. It proved to a most unusual conversation.

“Let me get this straight, Fowler, you’re ordering asteroids to the size specifications you’ve sent us, and you want them hollowed out?” one owner asked.

“That’s correct, Sir,” Nikki replied.

“What in the dark of space are you going to do with all these rocks?” another asked.

Nikki laughed, even though it probably wasn’t the most appropriate time to do so, and said, “The Haraken president is going to throw them at Portland’s fleet.”

There was dead quiet on the comm, and Nikki was sure that she had blown the request. Then she heard laughter, small at first and then a bellowing that was followed by several coughing fits. Finally, someone leaned into their comm and said, “Well, break a shaft, Nikki, why didn’t you say so in the first place? Can do for the Harakens.”

When the owners regained control of themselves, Nikki added, “And one more thing, you’re getting paid for your work, and it’s coming out of Tribune Woo’s account.” Nikki wouldn’t have been surprised to know grins were forming on owners’ faces across the belt.

Later, as the owners contacted their underlings to begin fulfilling the strange order, one field manager said to his owner, “This is crazy, boss, getting paid to carve out rocks to help the Harakens defend the station with asteroids against UE forces.”

“I can’t say I can argue with that sentiment, but think on this,” the owner replied. “If the president’s gambit isn’t successful, it might not matter. We probably won’t have a station around to ship our ore through or spend our credits at.”

The establishment of a staging point for the rocks, outward of the station, created a huge demand for services of all kind. Freighters, small yachts, a couple of liners, and numerous ore haulers and reclamation vessels headed for the coordinates Nikki distributed. Each owner or captain was required to register their ship and the services they would be providing with the station to gain approval first. Patrice had her militia personnel dive in to help Nikki and Yun coordinate the enormous effort.

The liners became small oases of food and rest for the people who were working as many hours as they could manage. The freighters were supplying reaction mass for larger vessels, fuel for smaller vessels, and supplies of all type, and the yachts were acting as shuttles, luxurious shuttles, but shuttles nonetheless.

Jorre piloted his reclamation tug into a holding position alongside several other tugs. He glanced toward the copilot’s seat, which until today had been empty since the day he bought the vessel. Pauline sat there, smiling shyly back at him. Jorre had heard the announcement from the station director for work at the staging point, and his first thought was to find Pauline and ask her to accompany him. To his surprise, she said, “Yes,” adding, “it’s not every day you get an offer to save your home.” She had kissed him on the cheek and run to pack a bag.

Cordelia calculated that in the time they had before Portland arrived, the asteroids would have to be moved from the belt by the carriers. Miko Tanaka and Edouard Manet piloted their ships, the
No Retreat
and the
Last Stand
, to the belt’s staging position. They had expected to wait while the miners organized themselves. Instead, they found double rows of ore haulers waiting, with carved-out asteroids in their grips. The miners were skilled blasters, and within minutes of selecting and surveying a choice rock they knew where to set charges to crack the rock in half. Then they had used various processes to carve out the excess material to create the parabolic shapes requested.

The carriers maneuvered into positions, the bays opened, and the tethering beams activated. Immediately, the haulers and tugs began pushing their loads toward an open bay, coordinating with the bay’s crew chief. Within an hour, the
Last Stand
, the smaller carrier, was on its way to the station’s staging area, and the
No Retreat
followed soon after.

At the station staging point, Jorre eased his tug forward to grasp an asteroid from the
Last Stand
, his face screwed up in concentration. On his comm, the carrier’s flight chief signaled when the beams were cut, passing the load off to Jorre, who was excited to see that he had retrieved his load first, but then he realized he had no drop location to head toward.

“Anxious as always I see, young captain.”

“Cordelia,” Jorre exclaimed.

“The coordinates are in your computer, young captain. Drop your load there and ensure it has zero velocity relative to the station.”

“Ser Pauline, my thanks for the beauty you grow,” Pauline heard in her comm headset.

“You would be the recipient of the orchids, Jorre’s benefactor,” Pauline replied. “The way he gushes about you is enough to make a girl jealous.”

“And yet
you
sit beside him, young Ser. It might help you to know that I’m a century too old for your young man. Good fortune to you, Pauline.”

When Cordelia closed the comm, Pauline looked at Jorre in astonishment. “You didn’t tell me you had a thing for older women,” she teased, much to Jorre’s confusion and consternation.

Tatia wondered at Alex’s forethought. He’d ordered a probe launched in Sol’s outer belt when they first crossed the field headed inward to Idona Station. The probe saved them days of time that they would have lost sending the
Rêveur
out to communicate with the miners. At the time, she couldn’t see the value and asked Alex why.

“I have a fondness for asteroid fields and miners, Tatia. Harvesting them was the reason I met the Méridiens,” he said to her.

Tatia’s question to Alex this time was, “How many rocks do you want us to get?”

Alex’s equally odd response this time was, “Haul them out until our time is up. You can never have too many rocks.”

For days on end, the people of Idona space — Harakens, stationers, miners, captains and crew, and visitors — labored to fulfill Alex’s crazy plan. Despite the long hours and hard work, the mood was generally upbeat.

It wasn’t that the people didn’t know that this was one of the strangest ways they had ever heard of to take on a dangerous UE fleet and that there was every possibility it would fail; it was the fact that the people, for once in a long time, were united in a common cause. They were working to save a place that had been transformed from a derelict outpost to a home for most and a safe haven for others.

Previously, to most stationers, Idona was a place to exist. Now it was a place to prosper, but more important, it was a new way of living, of existing together without the stifling stress the UE policies had created, and they, most of all, were adamant about protecting it from some egomaniac of an admiral bent on destroying it.

So they mined asteroids, carved them, loaded them, unloaded them, tagged them with sensors that were wedded to traveler controllers, and settled them into discreet groups that related to the side of a particular carrier and the order of launch. The groups of asteroids grew as myriad small ships — tugs, ore haulers, and reclamation vessels — any craft that could safely move an asteroid piled them up. And just as important, each small ship was required to adopt the asteroids they transported. It would be their job, at the appropriate time, to repeat the exact process. For each barrage’s preparation, the haulers would have to attach the same asteroid to the same bay’s beams on the same ship’s side from where they had originally unloaded it.

The key to this carefully crafted routine was to allow the sub-wing of travelers to chase their assigned rocks once the barrage was released by the carrier. In any human endeavor, this type of precision without rehearsal would have been fraught with errors, some of which might have led to the death of pilots, but the SADEs depended on the Harakens’ technical infrastructure.

The carriers’ and travelers’ controllers were at the heart of the complicated procedures. Movement of an improper asteroid toward a bay at loading time, and the carrier’s controller, receiving the asteroid’s transponder signal, would notify the vessel operator and redirect the operator to the proper bay. This and innumerable other crosschecks gave the Harakens a chance at succeeding with Alex’s plan where others would have stalled at the first barrage.

Tatia, Sheila, and Reiko were locked in an intense discussion for hours. Alex, Julien, and Renée were nearby and could often hear the women raising their voices. At one point, Julien inquired of Alex if he shouldn’t be assisting them with the barrage computations.

Overhearing his question, Renée replied, “This isn’t a question of computation, Julien, it’s a matter of intuition … work best left to women.”

Alex grinned at Julien and walked away, refusing to touch Renée’s comment.

It would leave Julien wondering if SADEs could be intuitive until he reached the point where he decided that if he survived the upcoming fight he might have centuries to discover the answer to that question.

The women’s discussion centered on Portland’s reactions to different barrage formations, but the permutations were too many to consider. So the decision was to proceed in a manner that limited the admiral’s options.

“Portland will surround his battleship with other capital ships, which will be commanded by his most loyal people,” Reiko said. “The perimeters of the fleet will be manned by destroyers, captained by the admiral’s camp followers, if you will. Send the first bombardment directly at the extreme perimeter ships, and there is a high possibility of them shifting away from the fleet.”

“Away from the fleet, not closer?” Tatia asked.

“Say you’re a destroyer captain, who has been going along for the ride with the admiral, until now. You’re out on the periphery of the fleet because you aren’t one of the committed. You’re sailing to attack the Harakens and Idona Station again, where Portland lost most of his fleet last time. Now, all of a sudden and very mysteriously, a great number of huge rocks comes flying past the station at your warship.”

“Oh … I get it,” declared Sheila. “We’re the mysterious aliens of the deep dark. Who knows what we’re capable of? And closing toward Portland’s battleship might not be the safest place to be.”

“Excellent,” Tatia said. “Instead of a barrage with travelers behind the asteroids, we can start with launches of just rocks to force the fleet apart, perhaps even creating avenues.”
You can never have enough rocks,
Tatia thought, recalling Alex’s words. “I like this concept,” she added. “If the fleet sees successive waves of asteroids sailing past, it won’t be expecting our travelers when we launch an armed barrage.”

“Does this mean that we’ll have to reprogram the travelers to mate with later groups of rocks?” Sheila asked.

“No, not if we just take some of the surplus groups of asteroids and have Cordelia program them as the initial launches,” Tatia replied.

“You know, I wanted to ask you about those extra asteroids,” Reiko said. “What made you expend the extra effort to haul them out in the first place? I mean it’s great that we have them, considering the changes to our plan, but I’m curious as to your reasoning.” When Tatia and Sheila started chuckling, Reiko became a little miffed and exclaimed, “What?”