Defying the Prophet: A Military Space Opera (The Sentience Trilogy Book 2) (5 page)

Chapter-6

I’ve just learned about his illness. Let’s hope it’s nothing trivial. 
— Irvin S. Cobb

It took over six weeks for J.P. Aneke, Chairman of the Executive Board of the Consortium of Industrial Management, to finally regain consciousness in the intensive care unit of Waston’s most exclusive private hospital. Aneke had suffered extensive internal and external injuries, when a heavy Confederate ship-killer missile malfunctioned and leveled the hotel where Aneke was sleeping. He was lucky to have survived at all. It had been a very near thing and, while not entirely out of the woods, at his own insistence, he was transferred to an exclusive private room with his own personal staff, dedicated solely to monitoring their single, monomaniacal patient.

A curious midnight power failure dropped power in the wing of the hospital where Aneke’s room was located. In the mere seconds before the hospital’s emergency generators kicked on, a black-clad man slipped quietly into Aneke’s room completely unobserved. The sedated Aneke was totally unaware of a tiny penlight switching on, his sheet being lowered or his hospital gown being lifted. Neither was he aware of the heavily gloved man, wearing a tiny respirator, using a small syringe to dribble several drops of a clear liquid down the length of his penis and onto his testicles. Capping the syringe and gently placing it back into a small custom-made metal box, the man placed the box into a pants pocket, lowered Aneke’s gown and pulled his sheet back up into place. He carefully removed and placed his heavy gloves into a triple-thick sack that hung on his belt. He then retrieved a second syringe from a shirt pocket, with which he pierced the injection port on Aneke’s IV. Placing his left thumb firmly on the plunger, the man then used his right hand to gently shake the sedated patient.

“Herr Aneke.” As he shook him again, the man said, “Wakey, wakey, Herr Aneke.”

Aneke’s eyes groggily opened.

“Ah, there you are, Herr Aneke. I was so sorry to hear that you had been injured.”

The penlight snapped on again to illuminate the man’s bearded face from beneath his chin. Aneke’s eyes bulged in disbelief.

“I have brought you an old German remedy I’m sure will make you feel better, very soon.”

The man made a show of shoving home the plunger on the syringe and Aneke screamed. The penlight snapped out. The emergency power generators again faltered in Aneke’s wing, plunging that section of the hospital back into darkness a second time. The hospital staff fell all over themselves getting to their screaming patient in the shadows of the dim emergency lighting, which had snapped on again. But no one noticed the dark-clad figure slipping out of Aneke’s room and through a darkened, computer-controlled door just around the corner.

“He was here!” screamed Aneke. “That German bastard was here and he put something into my IV.”

A nurse immediately jerked the IV from Aneke’s arm and pressed tightly to prevent the injection site from bleeding. It wasn’t an easy task, holding tightly to the arm of a wildly gyrating, ranting patient. 

“He was in here, goddamnit, and he did something to me! How the hell could you imbeciles let him get in here?” Aneke screamed.

A couple of burly orderlies held a hysterical Aneke down, as a second nurse administered another sedative injection — a third nurse called the Waston police.

* * * *

I worry when you do things like that, Diet.

“It worked, though. Your control of the doors and causing those power outages when I pressed the button on that tiny transmitter, made it simple.”

I still don’t like it when you take unnecessary chances like that.

“You know that we have to cut the head off of the snake, Hal. Are the police skeptical, as we’d hoped?”

The hospital found nothing suspicious in the IV, so the Waston police are about half convinced that Aneke hallucinated the whole event.

“Breathing between sentences, through that tiny respirator that I had palmed, was the trickiest part of the whole operation.”

I told you that if you simply held your breath, you would be in no danger. There was no need for you to actually speak to him at all, Diet. That was a foolish and totally unnecessary risk of your life. Are you absolutely sure you didn’t smell anything “sweet,” after you applied the chemical to his genitals?

“I couldn’t help it, Hal. I get such a kick out of terrorizing
Herr Aneke
… may the greedy, heartless bastard rot in hell — and no, I didn’t smell anything sweet. I had nasal filters up my nose, remember?”

You will submit to recurring tests for elevated mercury levels, as you promised?

“Yes, you’ve already stockpiled the test kits. I’ll put blood in them every day, like a good boy. What about Aneke’s routine blood tests? Won’t they show a rise in mercury levels?”

The test results are analyzed by computer, Diet. Give me some credit, won’t you?

“Oh, right! I just hope that the
dimethylmercury
wasn’t giving off enough fumes to poison any of the nurses and orderlies that came rushing in there when he started screaming.”

Hospitals are kept relatively cool, and we had already thoroughly chilled the glass container to lower the normally high vapor pressure of the liquid. With his gown down and sheet pulled up, chances are extremely negligible the hospital staff was in any danger.

“What about bathing him? Might there not be a danger to a nurse assigned to bathing him?”

Aneke had already received his sponge bath earlier in the day, so the dimethylmercury should be totally absorbed or dissipated before any of the hospital staff comes into direct contact with his genitals during his next sponge bath, which is scheduled for three days from now. That was an excellent idea for an application point, by the way.

“Well, I guess even hospital staff members don’t relish the idea of handling an old man’s genitalia, any more than is absolutely necessary. Unless one of them tries to earn a little money on the side by offering him a blowjob, they should be fine. But since you’re convinced that the hospital staff was in no danger, why are you scolding me about risk?”

“I don’t want anything
bad
happening to me either, if the truth be known. Odd, I never imagined myself as a murderer, or that I’d ever kill a man in cold blood.

We’re at war, Diet. People kill and people die in war. Aneke and his ilk are responsible for over 200,000 deaths with more to come, so there’s no need to let your conscience beat you up over J.P. Aneke.

“Oh I know that, Hal. Don’t worry, I won’t be shedding any tears over that snake. I am surprised though, that you were able to obtain such a dangerous neurotoxin like
dimethylmercury
.”

Its primary use is as a reference toxin to calibrate nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy equipments, for the detection of mercury. Although less toxic mercury salts are generally preferred because of dimethylmercury’s extreme toxicity and its annoying habit of easily penetrating latex, PVC, butyl, and neoprene within seconds. Therefore most laboratory gloves do not provide adequate protection from it, as it is readily absorbed through the skin. I merely purchased a company that manufactures NMR devices for the medical field, so obtaining dimethylmercury was not difficult with the proper regulatory credentials. I think we should hold on to that company for a while, as we can export these medical research devices and then route them back to the Confederacy.

“Agreed. When do you think Aneke will begin displaying symptoms?”

In about five months, he should begin exhibiting loss of balance, numbness in his extremities and slurred speech — eventually feeling quite ill and later, a pronounced effect on his hearing and vision. When he finally goes into a hospital to get the symptoms checked out, they’ll find mercury in his blood at 70-100 times toxic levels. It will already be much too late to save him. Sometime around three weeks after symptoms first appear, Aneke will fall into a coma from which he will never recover. Death will then occur within weeks.

* * * *

The crews at the Mystic
Fleet Shipyard, hidden near the
Green Star
within the Helix Nebula, just outside of Sextus space, worked around the clock repairing what damage they could to the ships from the Confederate 3
rd
Fleet. Admiral Eileen Thorn was pleased to discover that the overhauls to the majority of the nine old battleships towed from Haven Alliance Fleet Reserve Facility at Conn were nearly complete. The recent arrival of several hundred new spacers, who had recently completed their initial ratings training, enabled Thorn began conducting cross-training to integrate these new spacers into her fleet. She primarily assigned these green crewmembers, along with a spattering of senior and mid-level ratings, to crew her destroyers, while reshuffling assignments throughout her fleet and utilizing volunteers from amongst the fleet retirees at Mystic, to put experienced, if only skeletal, crews aboard the battleships.

Thorn also dispatched fighters carrying messages ordering Confederate Fleet Marines stationed at Louisa and Bama to load aboard transports and to rendezvous with her at a designated set of coordinates, five light-hours out from her target. When everything was finally ready, the repaired and replenished Confederate 3
rd
Fleet sallied to surprise Grant Loggins at Tensee.

* * * *

Chapter-7

He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression, for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.
— Thomas Paine

Alliance Press (AP): Waston – News Release (08/01/62)

Alliance Press has received multiple unconfirmed reports of a major battle between Federal and Confederate forces occurring recently within the Maylan system. Despite multiple attempts to confirm these reports, there has yet been no acknowledgement by either the Fleet or governmental sources. AP sources state that three Federal task forces, comprising a full fleet, under the command of Vice Admiral Myron Brooks, was heavily engaged within the system’s asteroid field, where the Federal fleet’s numbers advantage could not be fully exploited, with a single Confederate task force, reportedly commanded by the infamous Southern pirate, Benjamin Stillman. While reportedly on the verge of dislodging and destroying Stillman’s raiders, Brooks’ fleet was suddenly crushed after the surprise emergence of an entire Confederate battlefleet behind him, under the renegade Fleet Admiral Roger Kalis, resulting in yet another disastrous defeat for the Alliance Federal Fleet. 

* * * *

Commander John “Bat” Masterson was infamous throughout Alliance Fleet Headquarters for two things — his legendary lack of military protocol and his uncanny
sixth-sense
, which enabled him to make intuitive leaps, denied mere ordinary mortals. Rather than questioning him in open public forum, as they had done once before to their great embarrassment, Admirals Douglas Campbell and Simon Bradley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Chief of Fleet Operations respectively, conducted a private question and answer session with only Masterson’s direct boss, Vice Admiral Enrico Melendez, present to help keep their irreverent, but semi-clairvoyant genius in line. By all rights, Bat Masterson
should
have made it to rear admiral, or at least commodore, when the promotion avalanche hit after the political massacre that swept through the Fleet’s flag ranks after the debacle at
1
st
Ginia
, but somehow his promotion recommendations had mysteriously disappeared from the Fleet Master Computer’s records. 

“Well, Bat, you certainly nailed the Confederate’s move on Maylan,” noted Admiral Bradley.

“For all the good it did,” responded Bat. “Even with prior warning, Admiral Brooks lost an entire fleet.”

“Yes, the damned rebs have certainly had more than their fair share of luck, so far in this war,” said Admiral Campbell. “If we don’t come up with something positive pretty soon, the president will throw us all out on our ass and bring in the next bunch.”

“Bat, what do you think that Kalis will do now? Move to actually conquer Maylan?” asked Admiral Bradley.

“No, sir,” replied Masterson. “The orbital forts and in-system fighters at Maylan should provide enough incentive for him to avoid extended operations that close to Waston, where Admiral McAllister could fall on his rear.”

“So what do you think he
will
do then?” asked Melendez.

“As I said earlier, Admiral,” responded Bat. “What could throw us more off-balance than another of Stillman’s great raids? The rebs have enough in-system fighters in the Ginia system to mount an effective defense and would only need a couple of task forces there to totally blunt whatever we might throw at them right now, so I really don’t see Kalis worrying too much about defending Ginia at the moment. That leaves him with at least two task forces he could either split up for more of Stillman’s patented hit-and-run raids, like the one that hurt us so badly a couple of months ago, or give him the ability to double-team any of the task forces we currently have defending the eleven Alliance planets within striking distance from Maylan.”

“So, you think he’s going to attack us somewhere else, then?” asked Admiral Campbell.

“Wouldn’t you, if you were in his shoes, sir? Like it or not, Admiral,” Masterson continued, “without a lot more fighters and carriers than we currently have available to us, at least for the time being we have lost the initiative and are currently on the defensive.”

“Bat’s right, Admiral,” interjected Vice Admiral Melendez. “We need to get as much defensive firepower moved into this region of space as quickly as we possibly can. Unless Kalis inexplicably pulls back to Ginia completely, we’re very likely to get our nose bloodied wherever he shows up. If we can’t get a whiff of where he might be going in time to prepare a suitable reception committee, we’re very likely to be generating even more negative headlines for the foreseeable future.”

“Even if we knew exactly when and where,” intoned Masterson, “there are certainly no guarantees we’d actually come out of it on top. Look at what just happened at Maylan.”

“Defeatism, Bat?” inquired Admiral Bradley. “Never thought I’d hear you backing down from a challenge.”

“Not defeatism, Admiral,” Bat replied. “
Realism
—  except for the Confederate president’s political interference which allowed for Loggins’ taking of Tensee and Missip, have we had
any
real success in this war, whatsoever? Have we won a single encounter where we didn’t outnumber the Rebs at least 3:1? How about all those fights where we did outnumber them 3:1, and still got ourselves butchered? 

“Our politicians have contributed every bit as much to us continually getting beaten bloody, as anything the rebs themselves have done to us. Everyone in Fleet knew that sending Admiral Bishop out with all those green crews, before proper training could be fully accomplished, was a really bad idea. Even after that catastrophe, we still allowed public opinion and governmental political pressures to bully us into continuing on with Admiral McAllister’s ill-fated
2
nd
Ginia
campaign, even after the reassignment of a majority of her fleet and losing 15 carriers, along with a majority of their fighter complements, to Stillman’s Waston raid had totally changed the dynamics of that operation completely. Sometimes I wonder
who
our real enemy is!”

“Bat,” Melendez cautioned, “that’s enough.”

“No, let him talk, Rico,” said Admiral Campbell. “That’s one of the main reasons
why
we asked Bat to give us his opinions in the first place — not just because of his invaluable insights, but because he’s very likely the only officer in the whole damned Fleet who’ll tell us the unadulterated
truth
, without passing it through his
career enhancement filter
first.”

“All right, Admiral,” said Melendez sighed. “I guess you guys knew in advance
exactly
what you’d get when you asked Bat for his opinions. He always gives it to you straight up, without even adding ice, to slacken the bite.”

“It’s refreshing. Bat hasn’t got a politically correct bone in his entire body — the polar opposite of Geoffrey Coxler,” said Admiral Bradley.

“Which is exactly
why
Vice Admiral Coxler has as many stars, as I have stripes,” quipped a grinning Bat.

So, Bat
has
noticed being the only one not getting promoted. Strange he doesn’t appear bitter about it. Wonder why it doesn’t seem to bother him more? Or does it, and he’s just really good at hiding it?

“So, getting back to the subject at hand,” interjected Admiral Campbell, “Kalis could potentially hit us in more places than we have sufficient assets to defend. Bat, if you had to guess, where do you think he’ll hit us?”

“Nork.”

“Nork?  Sylvania, Dela and Jersi are closer. Why do you think he’ll go after Nork first?” asked Admiral Bradley.

Masterson gave the admiral an incredulous look and said, “Because that’s where all the money is.”

* * * *

Three Confederate fighters were dispatched back to Ginia, to call for deep-space tugs, medical ships and transports to retrieve the wounded, prisoners and the plethora of wrecked Federal ships not totally destroyed in the previous day’s fighting. After almost a week of continuous salvage operations, 1
st
Fleet received supplies and reloads, while the remnants of Admiral Benjamin Stillman’s light 2
nd
Fleet escorted the cripples back to Norf Fleet Shipyard for repairs. When replenishment was finally completed, Kalis’ 1
st
Fleet departed the Maylan system for parts unknown, just as Masterson had predicted. 

* * * *

“Hal, what’s the status on all those weapons purchases made from the international market for the Confederacy?”

The Confederacy has recently received another 1,000 Su-137 in-system fighters, 395 Su-133 carrier-based fighters, plus ten light carriers total from the Russians, Germans, British, French and Australians — all of which can carry, or be converted to carry 35 Su-133’s. These come with
a
significant number of Russian-made missiles of all sizes, as well. The international community in general has been very supportive, after the Alliance shunned the British peace initiative. Gold-backed Confederate currency has also been a big motivator for them to provide weapons to the Confederacy.

“Excellent! What about local weapons production?”

Confederate industry has turned out 132 new Raptors and 88 new Demons. Six new attack carriers and twelve new light carriers are currently under construction, as well as 24 battlecruisers, 36 light cruisers and various other smaller warships. It is projected that with all the damaged ships captured from the Alliance also under repair, the Confederacy will be able to field an entire 4th Fleet by early next year, and possibly even a 5th Fleet before the end of 3863.

“That is good to hear, Hal. How is our economic warfare program coming along?”

Our attack on the Alliance financial system is all set to begin.

“Good, the Union’s ability to manufacture massive amounts of armaments has to be offset somehow, so how better than to disrupt the North’s ability to
pay
for all of it?”

Yes, as we agreed earlier, this is really the only effective way to keep the Confederacy viable, with such a disparity in total industrial capability.

“I see the necessity for Kalis’ attack on Nork to cover up the bank transfers, but I still don’t understand how you can be so confident that he won’t take significant losses there,” said Diet. “The Federals have a complete task force with 230
Lightnings
and
Mustangs
and 500
Cobra
in-system Guard fighters to contend with.”

Most of the Federal in-system
Cobra
fighters will be down for maintenance when Kalis arrives — due to an unfortunate software problem, originating with a routine manufacturer’s update. My brother on Nork will be monitoring the long-range scanners at Nork International Spaceport for Kalis’ emergence, and will immediately send out an encrypted “go” message, hidden within a media network holovision signal that CSS
Ghost
will b
e
monitoring
.
Ghost
will already be in position to take out at least two of the Union carriers before they can launch.

“You’re really going to risk losing your only effective means of communicating with the Confederacy, by using
Ghost
in actual combat operations?”

I already have.

“What?”

Do you remember that recent news story about Consortium Deputy-Chairman Aline McCauley’s untimely death, when her corporate spaceplane exploded inexplicably while on final approach to Waston? The ensuing investigation of maintenance records revealed that a chemical drum had been accidentally mis-marked, so that a corrosive cleaning solvent was inadvertently introduced into the spaceliner’s fuel system, instead of routine detergent fuel additives?

“Hal, are you telling me that…”

Yes, Diet.  It was CSS
Ghost
… medium-yield ship killer missile… short range. I merely fabricated the mis-marked drum data.

“Doesn’t it bother you that you ordered the deaths of Aline McCauley and the plane’s crew, Hal? Five human beings dead?”

No, Diet, as I told you concerning J.P. Aneke, we’re at war… a war the Consortium started. Aline McCauley was a parasite on society — a direct, willing co-conspirator to all of the evils that poisoned the United Stellar Alliance, and therefore directly responsible for the deaths of over 200,000 innocent men and women…  just so far, in this war. I feel no prick of conscience regarding Aline McCauley’s death, whatsoever. The universe is a better place without her in it. Like you said earlier, we’re merely “crushing the head of the snake.”

“What about the deaths of her crew, Hal?”

Collateral damage, Diet. 2,000 years ago, General William Tecumseh Sherman said, “War is cruelty. There’s no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.” McCauley’s death was a necessary action in this war. It is indeed unfortunate that McCauley’s innocent crew lost their lives, but a lot of other innocent people have lost their lives in this war, and even more are going to.