First Strike (4 page)

“I have had the prisoners you requested gathered,” the warden said. Even the android’s voice was inhuman, completely atonal. “They are waiting for you in the visitor’s room. I must warn you that if they attempt to take you prisoner, we will have no option, but to flood the room with capture gas.”

“Understood,” Joshua said. He wouldn’t allow the prisoners to intimidate him. They were humans, after all, not aliens shaped like humanoid crocodiles with smiles to match. “Take me to the compartment.”

The android bobbed its head and walked backwards without changing posture. It could move in almost any direction, twisting in ways no human could match. Perhaps there were AIs behind the androids rather than humans, although rumour suggested that most of the operators were actually cripples. Remote operations was a field that even a paralysed man could enter.

Joshua smiled as the prisoners looked up when he entered. Some of them had clearly maintained military appearance while in custody, others had let themselves go, growing their beards and hair until it fell around their waists. Only one of them was female, a butch woman who had been charged with striking her commanding officer and refused to either apologise or accept guilt. Nearly all of the civilian prisoners were male. Female prisoners found themselves in a very unpleasant kind of hell.

“My name is Joshua Wachter – yes,
 
that
 
Joshua Wachter,” he said, by way of introduction. “I’ll keep this brief. I require a number of experienced crewmen to carry out a very sensitive mission – a dirty dozen or two. Your superiors have agreed that those of you who volunteer for this mission and come back alive will have their sentences commuted. Those who wish to remain in the military will have their records wiped; I can offer jobs to those who want to serve in space or you can return to Earth without any further time in jail.”

He smiled thinly. “I should warn you that the odds of survival are low and we may all be killed,” he added. “I don’t have any tolerance for military formality, but I’ll space anyone who imperils the ships or the mission. No drinking or drugs will be permitted” – he gave a hard look to a weasel-faced man who had been charged with smuggling cannabis onto a military base – “and bad behaviour will result in the culprit being thrown in the brig and then returned to this hellhole. Any questions?”

It was the butch woman who spoke first. “What’s in it for us?”

Joshua pretended to consider. “Well, you’ll be out of here for a start,” he said. “And then there’s the extra pay and the chance to live a normal life afterwards. I can even throw in a shitload of money if you want. Those who survive will be set up for life.”

“I don’t know,” the weasel-faced man said. “I hated military discipline when I joined.”

“So why did you join?” another man snapped. He’d been thrown in the brig for rioting on base. “Sir, I accept. What do we do to join?”

“You have two hours to decide,” Joshua said. “If you want to join the team, call the warden and inform him. You’ll be shipped to a base and transferred to the squadron within two days. If not...well, thank you for considering it.”

He nodded to them and strode away, leaving them alone to think while he returned to his flitter. Organising a small squadron was tricky. He’d never had to outfit warships before, let alone ensure that there was nothing onboard that had come directly from Earth. But then, the crew DNA alone would prove that they’d been human. The Admiral might be disappointed if
 
anything
 
survived a ship’s destruction.

But the Admiral had been right. There was no other choice.

“Where the hell did you get these clunkers?”

Joshua chuckled.
 
Clunkers
 
was an apt description for six starships that had been constructed over seven hundred years ago and traded from planet to planet until they had finally been purchased by the human race. The hulls were the only parts of the ships still original, but much of the interiors were still decades old. They’d been updated over the years by successive owners. The Association had long since lost track of what had happened to them, or of their current capabilities. Hundreds of other starships had fallen into unsafe hands over the centuries.

The Association’s drive fields allowed it to design starships to fit their sense of aesthetics, without needing to worry about visible drives. Each of the starships was a flattened oval shape, bristling with weapons and sensor blisters. Like most starships designed by the Cats, they wouldn't require any reconfiguration to be used by other humanoid races – and the interiors would be standardised. Up close, he could make out scorch marks on the hulls, the legacy of years spent serving less savoury owners. Piracy was epidemic along the Rim and even in some of the inner sectors as the Association lost interest in patrolling the space lanes.

It didn't surprise Joshua to know that the Federation had established some links with the pirates. There was an entire network of planets and settled asteroids out beyond the Rim, worlds colonized by races intent on escaping the Association and the brushfire wars between states that wanted to take its place as the premier galactic power. Joshua had even heard rumours that thousands of humans had headed out to the Rim themselves, particularly after Terra Nova.

He smiled as the shuttle drew alongside the light cruiser and mated airlocks, before there was a faint hiss as pressure equalised and allowed his small crew to board their ships. The clunkers had been hidden along the edge of the solar system, well away from any prying eyes, and the flight from Earth had taken hours. There was little point in establishing a quantum gate so far from Earth, even if its presence wouldn't have been a flag to hostile powers that something was afoot at the edge of Earth’s system. But then, the Association and the other Galactics tended not to think about the vast reaches of space between stars, not when they could skip through quantum space and reach their destinations far quicker than sublight traffic through normal space. The hidden colonies along the Rim used that trait to their advantage. Even with the most advanced sensor technology in existence, it was incredibly difficult to spot a hidden base unless it was radiating betraying emissions. A smart crew could remain hidden even at very close range.

The dry air of the clunker caught at his throat as soon as he stepped through the airlock and boarded the ship. Earth hadn't had much time to work on the ships before committing them to the raiding party, but the engineers had had time to scrub the air processors and fumigate the ships. The Association was plagued with infestations of small rodent and insect-like creatures that had hitched away on starships and been accidentally transplanted to a new world, the results of careless policies back at the start of their expansion era. These days, starships were regularly vented by their crews every few months. It didn't seem to help very much. Terra Nova had reported infestations of cockroaches before the Hegemony had bullied humanity into giving up the colony world.

“No stink,” Lieutenant Karla Richardson said. She’d punched her commanding officer – she claimed it was for incompetence. The court-martial board hadn't been impressed, even though she’d had a good record and a promising career. “That’s a surprise.”

Joshua nodded. He’d had enough experience with starships that had passed from owner to owner before winding up in his hands to know that some ships weren't properly cared for by their crews. It was insane not to take good care of the only thing protecting them from vacuum, but some crews just didn't seem to take it seriously. The Association had assisted hundreds of races to climb to the stars, often without teaching them the basics of how their technology worked. Many of those races were utterly dependent upon the Association for spare parts and even basic maintenance, just as Third World countries had bought weapons and supplies from the West on Earth. Joshua had never been able to discover if it had been deliberate malice or carelessness – but then, the Cats had never been a particularly malicious race. It was more likely that they’d assumed that their clients would either learn how to maintain their ships or remain dependent upon the Association.

“The crews did some work on her before handing her over to us,” Joshua said. He wondered, briefly, what would happen to the engineering crews, before remembering that the Federation Navy needed all the trained technicians it could get. They’d probably be sent to Titan Base or somewhere else isolated until the war began. He would have preferred to take them with his small squadron, but Admiral Sampson would never have agreed to let them go. “We need to check the command systems first, and then go over the entire ship in cynical detail.”

The Association’s founders had better eyesight than humanity, eyes that could see into the parts of the spectrum that were invisible to humans. Their command and control systems had been designed to be replaced if necessary by equipment more suited to other races; indeed, judging from the command nodes on the bridge, someone already had replaced them. Joshua powered up the first console and input the command codes, accessing the ship’s processor and ordering it to start the power-up sequence. There was a long pause and then the main lighting came on, revealing the bridge in all of its glory. Unlike the freighters Joshua knew and loved, there was a command chair in the center of the bridge for the commanding officer, one designed for a humanoid form. He could have sat on it comfortably.

“Nice,” Karla commented. She ran her hand over one of the other consoles, bringing up a status display. The ship’s fusion reactor was powering up, flash-waking the rest of its systems. Passive sensors activated, revealing the other five starships floating nearby, but little else. There was very little commercial activity along the edge of the solar system, apart from a handful of comet miners angling comets into the inner system and aiming them at Venus or Mars. The water-ice within the comets would help the terraforming projects. “It’s almost as good as new.”

Joshua shrugged. “Bring over the rest of the crew,” he ordered. “We need to check this ship completely before we even consider leaving the solar system.”

The Association had once had a mania for registering and certifying starships and their standards were still used throughout the galaxy. Every ship was supposed to pass basic checks before being allowed to leave the shipyard, and be regularly retested just to make sure that the crews weren't allowing their ships to sink into disrepair, but many commercial ships evaded the checks or falsified their results. Independent owner-captains lived on the margins and had no choice but to cut costs wherever possible, even though it risked running afoul of the law. Besides, they also knew exactly where they
 
could
 
cut corners. And it was their lives at risk if the life support failed while they were in quantum space.

Once the crew had boarded the starships, Joshua started to work through the entire set of checklists provided by the Association. Like so much else, the checklists were standardised and easy – if tedious – to follow. Five hours passed slowly as each system was checked and rechecked, a handful of components were marked down for replacement, and then supplies were drawn from the nearby stockpile to replace broken equipment. One of the ships had had a busted air processor that might well have killed the crew, if they’d failed to realise the danger in time to save themselves from the effects of oxygen deprivation. The supposedly infallible atmosphere monitoring systems had failed. Another had had the targeting system for its main phase cannon removed before they had been passed on to humanity. Joshua rolled his eyes when he heard the news. Someone probably intended to pass on the targeting system to pirates, confident that no one would be able to trace it back to the source.

Finally, the Clunker Fleet was ready to depart. Two smaller freighters would accompany them into quantum space, carrying what few supplies could be borrowed from Earth and some trade goods. It was a general rule of space trading that items gained value the further they were from their point of origin. Alcohol affected several other races like it did humans and vodka, scotch and rum had become surprisingly popular among the Galactics. Joshua had used wines to make money in the past, when he’d been buying other starships and trying to break into markets that were jealously guarded by commercial cartels. Even cheap wine on Earth could earn thousands of credits if sold to the right people.

“So,” Karla said, finally. “What are we going to call the ships?”

Joshua had thought about that on the shuttle. The Association’s ship naming conventions were incomprehensible to human minds, governed by a logic that didn't quite seem to make sense. Most of the other races had their own naming conventions, with the Hegemony taking the prize for producing the most pretentious names for their ships. But the ship had been renamed so many times that no trace remained of her original name and her previous owners had been careful to remove all traces of their own use before letting her out of their hands.

“This one will be
 
Blackbeard
,” he said, finally. He would have preferred to use names that suggested that the ships were being operated by the Hegemony’s more powerful neighbours, but they might have taken offense and – if they found out the truth – joined the war against Earth. “The other ship commanders can pick their own names – as long as they’re ones we can write down.”

Karla chuckled. One tradition the Federation Navy had borrowed from the Association was allowing small craft crewmen to name their own ships. Some were sentimental, some were amusing… and some no one dared write down. Every so often, senior officers would consider revising that policy, particularly after the media picked up on a particularly embarrassing nickname and gleefully posted it all over Earth and the Nine Stars. No one would forget the
 
Horny Goat
 
in a hurry.

“Not that we’re going to be announcing our names to our victims,” he added, after a moment. “Even flying the Jolly Roger would point them to Earth.”

“Unless someone nonhuman learned it from our culture,” Karla pointed out. The Galactics
 
loved
 
many of Earth’s old movies. Even the Funks of the Hegemony consumed westerns and blockbuster action movies, no matter how trite or overplayed. “I’m pretty sure there are a few pirate movies out there too.”

“It can't be helped,” Joshua said. There was nothing they could do if an alien pirate ship started pretending to be human. Instead, he picked up one of the datapads and checked the final results from the other teams. “We’re going to leave tomorrow, ideally. The supplies should be ready for us by then. Do you want to record a message for your family?”

Karla shook her head. “I ran away to join the Navy because of my family,” she said. “They wanted me to work at their little mom and pop store, if you can imagine that. I would have died in that little town where the only fun was trying to get to second base with your cousin, and then marrying some inbred moron and having ten kids with him.”

“You might not be coming back,” Joshua warned her. “Are you sure…?”

“They will be much happier without a message from me,” Karla said, firmly. “And don’t you dare offer them my money if I die. They don’t deserve it.”

* * *

“We received an update from Captain Hastings,” Commander Sooraya Qadir said. “
Cunningham
 
and
 
Halsey
 
have both completed their drive refurbishments and are ready for deployment. The 2
nd
 
Cruiser Squadron is now at full strength.”

“Good,” Tobias said. Sooraya was an oddity in the Federation Navy, a mustang officer who didn't come from one of the G13 nations. But then, given that she’d found the strength to escape Afghanistan and join Earth’s defence force, she deserved a chance to show what she could do. Starship command was unlikely, but a gunboat was a definite possibility. “I assume that the other squadrons have completed their own checks?”

“Yes, sir,” Sooraya assured him. “The IG teams will be on their way to the squadrons in another day, unless you wish to bring the inspection schedule forward.”

Tobias shook his head. The Federation Navy had been obsessive about readiness long before he’d become Chief of Naval Operations. Earth couldn't afford to copy the sloppy maintenance habits of the lesser Galactics, even with the reliable and interchangeable Association technology. The entire fleet – two hundred starships in all – had to be ready for immediate action if the Hegemony decided to move up their timetable and annexe Earth without bothering with a surrender demand. A commanding officer who allowed his ship to become unfit for service would be relieved and never allowed to command again, no matter what political or national patrons he had.

“No need,” he said, finally. He glanced down at the datapad in his hand. “Did Colonel Williams get back to us about ammunition stockpiles?”

“Not as yet, sir,” Sooraya said. “I believe that his staff are still chasing up the suppliers and attempting to ensure a speedy delivery.”