Federation Reborn 2: Pirate Rage (51 page)

Melwin might have been knocked out completely, and Theodore had been sharpening his knives to cut the strings and watch the man fall but then news of the B101a1 battle had come in just ahead of the news of the new Federation being formed in their own backyard. He'd had to back off and watch his own back.

In fact, he and Melwin had been forced into a sort of alliance to hold onto their positions and keep the other families at bay. It hadn't been easy nor pleasant for either family.

“Can it. Save it for someone you can really intimidate,” the prime minister growled. “I'm still expecting an answer.” He drummed his fingers on the linen covered table loudly as he stared at the former admiral.

“His majesty wants this matter resolved. Quickly. In order to do that, we need to draw on more forces. More than we currently have. So …”

“So, you leave two of our star systems defenseless?” the prime minister demanded.

“Hardly. Actually, I doubt Linnaeus will take many of the forces. Anything that can't keep up of course,” the minister stated. The prime minister glanced at Melwin for confirmation. The praetor nodded, again not meeting anyone's eyes.

“Go on, I'm listening,” he said, sitting back and relaxing slightly.

“Linnaeus knows that time is of the essence. We need to get in before the enemy can harden the defenses in Protodon and reinforce it with forces that will make it difficult or atrocious for our forces to crush. We do not want a slugging match.”

“No one said we were going to do that.”

“And yet, when you look at the reports Gumel presented and the report from Post, you can see a major increase in enemy forces. Now if you extrapolate from that, it means the enemy will continue to reinforce.”

“But Post smashed them flat.”

“All the more reason to reinforce then. We also have Fourth Fleet to consider.”

“Fourth … wait, didn't one of the Von Berks head in that direction?”

The minister of war nodded. “Indeed he did. He left Sigma to Rear Admiral Post and focused on the biggest targets closest to home.”

“Undoubtedly to get the most credit,” Melwin muttered. The other two men glanced at him coldly.

“Quite possibly,” the prime minister finally said. “But that is neither here nor there. Continue,” he said, eying the defense minister.

“Okay, we need to relieve them. We need to secure Protodon.”

“But the forces that De Gaulte pulls from Garth …”

“Will be made good. You have my word on that, Prime Minister. Once we know the numbers we will draw some from Home Fleet and some from other sources,” the minister of war soothed patiently. He glanced at the praetor for support. Melwin hesitated before he nodded.

“Harrumph,” the prime minister growled, sitting back. He turned and signaled to a bus boy. “Boy, we're ready for the menu,” he growled. “And be quick about it,” he snapped, ire finding a new source to vent against. One less likely to come back and haunt him politically later.

“Yes, sir,” the bus boy said, ducking into the kitchen to get the lead waiter.

“Sloppy help these days,” Melwin murmured, exhaling slowly as if sighing in relief. He looked over to the minister of war and then away, remembering after a moment that the Rico family owned the restaurant.

Chapter
29

With the latest convoy from Antigua in, Captain Montgomery was doing what was turning into a tradition, going over the extracts and detailed database files while Fletcher integrated them into their database.

He had help of course, Fletcher for one, and Lieutenant Lake for another. Despite it being Sunday Lake had taken her usual day off to come in to get a jump on the reading. She was in civilian dress, a long skirt and fetching white sweater. She seemed rather relaxed as she sat in her recliner, occasionally tapping a stylus against her bottom lip or otherwise toying with it.

He snorted mentally and stretched. He caught her eying him and waved off her look. He had been out of contact for months and therefore had a lot of catching up to do, which meant petabytes of reading.

He was determined to do it all, a form of penance and a way to get things back on track. He'd ordered a top to bottom house cleaning as well as a new database setup. Fletcher, Sprite, and the other A.I. were still working out the bugs in it, but it had already yielded some fresh clues which had led to some minor additional insight into the enemy.

The ansible wasn't the instant intelligence boon he'd hoped it was; there was a throttle on the amount of data they could transmit. That meant they could do small updates, excerpts and treatments, but full details and raw copies of high bandwidth files had to still be dispatched by courier or mail packet on through the convoy system. That took months to get from point A to B. It was also vulnerable to interception or loss.

But they were finally making some headway. Recently he'd gotten the two A.I. Clink and Fletcher to compare notes to help build a better picture of things based on the new database as well as Commander Lake's fresh eyes. She was still learning about how to set up a database. For months she'd just thrown everything into a filing system without analyzing it. Fletcher had been too new, too young to understand what to do when he'd been brought online.

It fell on Monty's shoulders. He should have sent someone out to oversee Lake. In fact, he had, but that person had been immediately tapped by the admiral to captain a ship. His lips twisted a bit at that thought. So much for good intentions.

He wasn't thrilled about the admiral bringing in new help or the new mission to Pi, but he also knew better than to protest it. He was still feeling out his position and knew he was on thin ice with some. His plan to keep the Intelligence community small and grow it slowly had obviously blown up in his face once. Now they were doing a free wielding messy approach. One with hunches and … he shook his head and tried to set the idea aside. He had to adapt, not go back into his shell he reminded himself.

Either that or he needed to resign and go back into the field and stay there. Since Admiral Irons had given him this second chance he wasn't going to abuse the man's faith. He wanted to prove himself worthy of that trust.

He'd been too cautious before, he admitted that privately in a corner of his mind. Hell, he'd never wanted the top slot to begin with! But the department had floundered about like a headless chicken without guidance. He'd taken the job, with the intention of doing his best once he'd come up with a game plan. He had spent entirely too long feeling his way into his position, and he'd been cautious about presenting information based on tentative leads. He held some regret there, but the practice had panned out. By making sure of their sources, even waiting to get confirmation from an independent one, yes they'd dragged the speed down but it had kept them from jumping on every false lead or conclusion.

This
Daikoku
was a case in point. There wasn't enough detail to make a proper conclusion, but the brass in the form of Admiral Irons had jumped all over it. He wasn't certain it would pan out or not. At least it had given him a chance to get the noobs out of his hair. Just maybe they'd find something. If not, well, they'd learn not to jump to conclusions. To look before they leapt.

And to definitely clear it with their chain of command before they and the lieutenant went straight to Commander Sprite.

During a cross check of the latest intel dump between the two prison camps, Fletcher got a hit. Hits were normal; they were sometimes confirmations of known facts, most of them old. But this one had a different implication. The word
El Dorado
was mentioned three times, and there was great secrecy about it in the POW population.

Monty read each of the reports when the A.I. presented it to him. He checked the definition of the word, and that made him even more suspicious. Then when he saw a word mixed in with the others, it clicked. Pieces fall into place, and he didn't like what he found. But this was a case of not just being alarmist, but that the brass had to know. Had to know ASAP. He wasn't sure if they could do anything about it, but that wasn't his problem. He slapped a classified cover on it all then had the team recheck their raw data to be certain while sifting for additional sources.

He looked up to the commander who had been browsing her own list of hits. “Lake, isolate those three point sources. There are two here, one in Pyrax. Get Irene to isolate them now. We need them bubble wrapped,” he ordered. “If necessary, stick them in stasis.”

She blinked in surprise. He was dead serious. “Yes, sir. Is it that bad? What did I miss?”

“Very bad. We've known the enemy has been looking for additional ships and manufacturing from the beginning. They tagged anything of importance as a high priority and sent tugs and ships to bring it back to their home system. That way they can rebuild and use it, and it is a means to deny it's use for anyone else to use against them.”

She nodded. “Yes, sir. We know that is how they've managed to build their fleet up the way they have.”

“Well, they had another tag, one for the jackpot, their pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The jackpot of their great scavenger hunt,” the captain said grimly. He tapped in a request and when the information came up, he turned the tablet to her so she could see it. The name was in bold followed by the description then artist renderings under it. “
El Dorado
. They stuck with a literal name for a mythical city of gold. In other words, it's a game changer.”

She read the entry in the encyclopedia, then frowned. “So … a city?” She wrinkled her nose. “Something like Antigua Prime?”

“No, it's worse than that when you see what else was caught in that net,” he said, typing in another word, this time into a different database. When he turned the tablet back to her, he watched her eyes go wide in shock. She looked up to him staring. He slowly nodded.

“Yes. Now we need to find out if it is correct. We're going to give these people one chance to cooperate. If they don't we'll have to take them apart neuron by neuron to learn what they know.”

She grimaced but nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“Get on it. This just became our number one priority.”

---<>))))

"Admiral, we've got a serious problem."

Irons sighed, sitting back and setting his coffee cup down. When Monty had called an emergency intelligence brief, he'd known it was bad. If it was enough that it couldn't wait three days for their regularly scheduled meeting, it really must be bad. "I love conversations that start with that," he drawled, eying the group.

The intel chief gave a sickly grin. He looked over to Lieutenant Lake. She was pale he noted. "How bad?" he asked after studying her for a moment and then indicated the seats across from him.

Monty nodded once and took his seat. Fletcher was already on the desk. Lake sighed as she flopped down in her chair. "As bad as it gets, sir. Horath has stumbled across a battle planetoid.
Olympus
class," Lake said, dragging it out into the open immediately.

Monty grimaced. She'd taken his thunder but that was okay. He was busy studying Admiral Irons for a reaction.

Admiral Irons eyes went wide as he jerked upright. "A …"

She nodded rubbing her temples. "An
Olympus
class battle planetoid. Here." She shot him the file in a tight encoded burst. He felt Protector apply his codes to decrypt it. He immediately peeled off a copy to Sprite.

The two A.I. scanned through the document and then her holo image appeared beside them. "It is based on interviews from three point sources," Fletcher supplied. “No database confirmations at all.

"Propaganda?" Admiral Irons asked as he studied it for himself. An
Olympus
class was a game changer with the current strategic situation. They were the largest hyper capable ships in existence, dwarf planets.

Back before the Xeno war the media had called them Death Stars, based on a giant battle station from a famous science fiction movie. He'd hated the damn things.

The
Olympus
class was the last of the planetoid classes designed before the Xeno war. He'd had a hand in their design. A peripheral hand actually, he wasn't fond of the planetoid concept and he'd made clear that view during his brief tenure at BuShips Weapons Design Board. That was undoubtedly why it had been so brief; he'd ruffled a lot of feathers by protesting the design. A lot of nests were feathered with the contracts to build the damn things, let alone the infrastructure to build them as well as the infrastructure to support them. Then of course there was the support fleets that went with the things.

It was no wonder he'd been transferred earlier than planned. Empires were built around the things. Undoubtedly he'd hit a few nerves with a few admirals looking forward to retiring into civilian contractor posts that had been lined up for their support he thought acidly.

Not that any of that mattered now, he reminded himself. Now they had to deal with the damn thing. If it existed.

A battle planet. Not a damn moon, a
planet
. He shook his head in thorough disgust—ten thousand kilometers of material. A hollow hundred-kilometer-thick shell filled with weapons, drives, power plants … entire cities.

They mounted enough firepower to lay waste to this sector. An entire
fleet
could dock inside it's cavernous bay interior. It took incredible amounts of fuel and antimatter to power the thing, let alone
move
it in subspace or hyperspace. One of the reasons he
hated
the damn things.

But, and it was a big but, if the Horathians had something like that it was a game changer. Nothing in their current arsenal could get through her shields or armor. If even half of her armories were intact …, he tried not to shiver at the thought. His thoughts turned to her compliment of parasite craft and support ships, if they got them.

No. If they had, they'd already seen them by now. They hadn't. Something else was going on with the parasite compliment. It was too much to hope for that they had been lost though.

"
Possible
but unknown if it is true at this point, sir. We can't rule the threat out," the intel chief said. He grimaced. "We need more data to confirm. Outside of what we have available, which is all second and third hand, the only way to confirm is to scout it."

"Which isn't possible. According to the data you picked up, she's in Sigma sector on the other side of the Horath empire toward the Veraxin core worlds," Sprite said. "To get into Sigma sector without passing by Horath, we'd either have to get in through a backdoor or have a navigator to make blind jumps. Both are dangerous and time consuming. They also require a lot of fuel and a heavy dose of luck to get in as well as out again."

"Which is possible," the intel chief said tapping her fingers on the table.

"You mean Ssilli or a selkie navigator?" Irons asked. He thought for a moment then sighed. "The selkie wouldn't be up to it. We're talking nearly a thousand light year jump—Ssilli or nothing. And right now our only two representatives of that species are busy trying to rebuild their race."

"Which rules them out. They are too precious a resource to waste on a good faith blind jump," Sprite said.

The intel chief opened her mouth and then closed it. He cocked his head.

Lieutenant Lake raised a hand. "Other options, sir?"

"Insert an intel team or operatives to work their way toward the reported location and get hard intel on it. This is sketchy at best," Sprite said. “Basically what Captain Montgomery was doing in the first place. But the problem is, it takes
time
, and the communication's chains are tentative and unreliable. That also takes time to set up and time to operate. Time we may not have.”

Irons grimaced. They had two good solid reports in that dump as well as a couple tentative clues. Clues mentioned in overheard conversations or from others who'd started to talk a little before they'd been killed by their own people.

One source from the Pyrax POW station was from a captured junior officer who had served on a ship that had carried teams to the planetoid just before his deployment with Admiral Rico. He'd clammed up after a little while though, but they did have the recordings of the first statement to go off of and prove the interrogator wasn't making it up. Monty had ordered all sources to be cocooned for their own safety. He'd also ordered all three to be prepped to be taken apart if necessary to get what they needed.