Family Law 2: The Long Voyage of the Little Fleet (39 page)

"Cowardly bastard, maybe he'll know better
who
to be afraid of next time," Bob snarled. The pad translated it for all of them and the barkeep looked big eyed at his accusation and backed up.

Once he had the story out of him the cop led them back outside. The bar owner was braver as soon as he was looking at their backs and shouted some objections about his ruined door. They ignored him.

One of the under-cops came back from the dead carrying a Biter pistol. He reported to his leader that all four of the Biters had discharged their weapons. The pad translated the leader's rank as captain.

"
Incredibly
stupid," Bart muttered. He was standing in front of Dauntless, where he'd stayed guarding him, not going in the bar. He had his carbine in hand but politely pointed at the deck.

"Why so?" the Bill with the Biter weapon asked, squinting while he looked at Bart.

"Shoot me with that stupid piece of junk." Bart invited.

"Certainly not!" he said, horrified.

"Look at the Badger," Bart said, stepping to the side a bit and pointing. Dauntless was sitting again, his back to the wall, wounded foot straight out in front of him. Nobody seemed in any hurry to get him a medic. The three shots he stopped with his vest were dull gray badges on his chest. Bart leaned over and picked at one with a single finger. The edge bent back so he could get a grip and he ripped it off the vest with a jerk. It was pressed into the weave of the fabric so hard it might have been glued on. He tossed the coin to the Bill who caught it easily. He looked at it closely before passing it to his superior.

"You're saying this was a Biter bullet?" the cop asked, plainly dubious.

"Yeah, total piece of crap weapon. We have
antiques
that shame it."

"Take the crazy's invitation and shoot him," the irked Captain ordered.

The Bill didn't seem to mind the idea when it was coming from his superior. The Biter pistol apparently wasn't too different for a Bill to grip. He drew a careful bead Bart's chest and shot. The pistol recoiled pretty substantially, but Bart didn't get pushed off balance. The suit flexed a little right around the point of impact . He didn't stop though, recovering from the recoil and putting another round on Bart's helmet visor. The bullet made a silvery smear across the clear face plate, hit the wall behind him throwing spalled chips every which way and flew off down the street with a 'Burrrrr' sound as the flattened slug spun off through the air. Everybody ducked a little, even though it was far too late to duck anything that was going to hit them.

"That seems sufficient testing," the Captain decided, "before one of us catches a bouncer."

"We call it a ricochet," Bob corrected the translator and got a flat voiced 'noted' from it.

The Captain walked away from Bob and his translator, past the corner where Dauntless sprawled and stood in the street nearly down to the pile of Biters. He was talking to someone, standing with his back to them and indeed got so animated he was making gestures even though it wasn't a video phone. When he finished and walked back he approached Bob.

"My superiors in Station Security instructed me to revoke your welcome on station. Your presence is no longer desired and they request you leave as quickly as possible."

"We don't stay where we aren't welcome," Bob assured him. "We won't forget either. We'll be back to the
Dart
in no more than ten minutes and I'll tell them to undock as quickly as can safely be done. Does that all translate clearly?"

"Yes, six hundred of your seconds. Do we need to provide transport for the injured one?"

"We can carry him easily enough. Don't bother to escort us. We can find our way."

"Bart, sling your weapon and carry Dauntless. We're going back the ship. He turned his back on the police and didn't waste any further pleasantries on them. He leaned over by the Biters and scooped up one of their weapons off as a trophy in passing. He half expected the Bills to object, but none of them called out to him.

"You set the pace, Bob," Mozart and I are both faster than you. Unless you want to ride Mozart?"

"They don't need to be rid of us that fast," he told Bart and set off at a good jogging pace. Bart carried Dauntless easily in his arms with the help of the powered armor.

"I'm sorry, I'm probably hurting you," Bart apologized, "it's hard to go fast
and
smooth in this rig."

"Don't worry about it," Dauntless said. "Just get me out of this Bill shit hole."

"Bob! He called to the Human's back, "I could hear the cop when he got upset and raised his voice talking to his commander. He was asking for reinforcements with heavy weapons. They must have overruled him because they didn't want the place shot up, because at one point he told them there was already damage to the public corridor from your bomb."

"It was just a grenade not a
bomb
. A bomb would have made a gapping big hole in their station, not a pock-mark in the deck paving."

"Noted" said the translation program.

* * *

The minor gas giant was beautiful. It was banded in pale violet, crème and a daffodil yellow. The cap they flew over had an angry purple bull's-eye that formed a hex. The round bands below it displayed evenly spaces cusps along their boundaries that suggested the same forces that formed the polar hex worked to divide them into cells too. There were a lot of moons and several rings, although they weren't the prominent feature.

The planet was laid on its side almost aligned with its orbit, so it took a long burn and an unusual maneuver to take up a retrograde orbit opposite its natural satellites. If the Badger ships that put a radio beacon on one of the ice moonlets had hung around they were lost among the other bodies and not radiating anything to make them stand out.

"Here we are," Gordon noted, waving at the forward view screens. "Do you want to call anybody or do anything to get this show on the road?" he asked Trader and Talker.

"We have no control. Fire freely on anything emitting an artificial signal. We've taken pains to post notices there would be a live fire exercise."

"Sounds fine to me," Gordon agreed. "Brownie, Thor, if it squawks kill it. You are weapons free." He leaned back in his acceleration couch and smiled at Lee. She raised a single skeptical eyebrow at his theatrical ease.

"I am weapons free," Thor acknowledged formally.

They coasted along ballistic for another twenty minutes, Gordon closed his eyes, hooked his middle arms in the safety harness and crossed his true arms. By all appearances he might have been sleeping. They didn't have to wait long.

"Signal coming over the horizon," Brownie announced. "Ninety millimeter wavelength. Range is extreme, two point three million kilometers." Gordon's eyes popped open. The main screen showed the potential target with a pale green circle around it.

"Paint it for surface detail," Thor instructed. "Closing rate and acceleration?"

"Mark...Pinged him, details in fourteen seconds. Closing rate approximately forty three kilometers a second. Target is on a lower orbit. The screen split and the left side showed all the vectors in a simplified schematic that didn't try to mimic scale or visual reality. "Target lead will increase significantly as we close. Radar says target is an ice ball of medium density. Not dressed, but no tumble, your typical irregular potato shape. No hard return from artificial structures."

"Come to one tenth G for stability. Set ship attitude to auto control for peashooter, release full auxiliary reactor control to auto and load small round. Auto-fire three rounds for intercept at one point six million miles," Thor instructed, "load next round, but wait for confirmation of miss or impact."

There was a few seconds delay and the ship lurched with the shot.

"Target accelerating, point six three G. First shots will miss," Brownie announced.

"Time delay from our hard ping to acceleration?" Thor asked.

"A bit over twelve seconds," Brownie supplied.

"Fire again for the current acceleration to remain constant," he ordered. The shot went off before he could say anything else. "Fire another round assuming the target acceleration to cease at same time interval it took to activate."

There was about a three second delay and it shot again.

"Fire lastly four assuming acceleration will double at same time interval as the first one."

Again after a slight delay it fired again.

"Reload, but hold fire," Thor said. They all watched the main screen silently.

"Strike! We hit him with shot three. Pinging him again," Brownie paused. "Target is reduced by about a third in cross-section. He has acquired a spin. No further acceleration," Brownie announced.

"We nicked him. Finish it off assuming he will maintain the present velocity. Send a ping timed to paint it after the hit." The ship lurched again.

After another pause Brownie reported, "Hard hit, no substantial portion of target remaining. I have one small return that must be the remains of the drive they used."

"Nice try, maneuvering to avoid fire," Gordon complimented them. "As you see there is an art to it. You can shoot at where you think they may jink," he said, demonstrating an abrupt change of direction with his hand. "It can be an interesting contest of minds."

"It may not be so easy against a real manned ship," Trader said dubiously.

"Oh, I don't know," Thor told him. "I saw Gordon lay three war shots on an empty sky and jump out. We weren't even around to watch and he bagged the USNA deep space battle platform
Florida
when they jumped into the Fargone system smack into the missiles Gordon left behind for them. He didn't even have a radar return off the
Florida
to help him guess, because she was still light years away. He just guessed where she'd show up jumping in."

"What is a deep space battle platform?" Talker asked.

"About a half trillion USNA Dollars of starship, before loading it out, at least eight, maybe ten times the mass of this one, a crew of about two hundred and enough weaponry to engage a substantial fleet or to reduce a hostile planetary surface," Thor explained.

Talker and Trader looked at each other. There was an exchange, but too subtle for the Derf or Humans to read. "A crew of two hundred of which of your races? A mix like you folks? And what do you mean by reduced?" Trader asked.

"Target!" Brownie interrupted. "Emitting on a different frequency. Much higher orbit, no, correction, making a high speed pass above orbital velocity, headed insystem. Higher than us. Pinging them for surface details. Twenty seconds for a read on them." Everybody waited silently.

"Hull matches the first Biter contact we had here," Brownie informed him.

"Voice contact. The Biters inform us they protest electronic aggression. They seem to have a pretty recent version of the Trade translation software. They protest our 'ping' caused them interference. They called it a pulse. Our computer corrected them and is offering a translation upgrade."

"Inform them we are engaged in a live fire demonstration exercise for the Badgers and it was made known locally. If they just jumped in they almost played target by accident. We know what they are now so we won't fire on them," Gordon concluded.

"The Biter vessel informs us this target shoots back and makes several untranslatable comments about the  diet, nesting habits and lack of genealogical history of the
High Hope's
crew," the translation program informed them.

"Computer, would you characterize the statements as cursing?" Gordon asked.

"There is a probability of seventy to seventy seven percent that any one portion of the statement is negative, due to single matching words and short phrases such as, grass eater, nest fouling and fatherless. However they do not rationally apply to live birth mammals and omnivores. The probability they are a form of cursing in the aggregate approaches unity however."

"Brownie, at what power level did you ping the Biters?" Gordon asked.

"Fifteen percent, sir."

"Do they have any radar emissions beside their radio communications?"

"Indeed, they do sir, at a much shorter wave length."

"Paint them very tightly at
full
available power and run the frequency through a range that covers both their radio and radar," Gordon ordered.

"Aye sir, rolling ship to bring sufficient emitters on line of sight," Brownie warned. They felt the ship twist under them. "Bringing auxiliary reactor back up and temporarily diverting power from non-essentials." The lights actually dimmed and a lot of amber lights appeared on the control consoles. Brownie was following his orders with enthusiasm. Using every watt to be had.

"Painting target. Full frequency shift will take eighteen seconds," Brownie warned. Then the lights came back up to full brightness and several people reported clean start up on environmental systems as well as  from the galley and other weapons systems. "No damage, no cross feed on newly installed systems, our radar feeds are all within safe temperatures." Brownie reported.

"What was the point of all that?" Talker asked.

"Just to teach them to be polite. I'd already promised not to fire on them," Gordon explained, "so I just took a very hard look at them with our radar."

Lee spoke up. "Talker, at this range our radar won't burn a hole through their hull, but I doubt they have much left in the way of electronics that are functional. You might let your people in system know that they may need rescued if they don't have life boats, or at least a
lot
of wire and spare parts."

Talker and Trader looked at each other but said nothing.

"And as far as your previous question," Lee spoke up, "the
Florida
likely carried a crew of all Humans. The North Americans have a very bad attitude about aliens and they don't like out-world Humans like me much better. When Thor says they could reduce a planetary surface he basically means reduce them to a state they couldn't resist an outside force. It depends on how hard they resisted what that would entail. It might be as easy as removing any weapon sites capable of firing on orbiting ships, or it might mean removing spaceports or even all visible cities. In the extreme I suppose it could mean reducing the entire surface to an uninhabitable state. We would very strongly disapprove of that. Nobody has ever done it and I hope nobody is ever stupid enough to do it, because what goes around comes around."