Hunter Legacy 9: Hero at the Gates (22 page)

As it happened, the next briefing was
delayed slightly, until we were in the Midnight system. Jane had been doing
some experiments with how far we could stretch the real time communications
aspect of the comnavsats, and found Midnight was about as far from Nexus as was
useful.

O'Neil was waiting for us in a shuttle, and
we swallowed it as we blew past Hunter's Redoubt. His XO-wife was with him. He
brought me up to date with happenings since I'd left, which amounted to, not
much.

Once again, the theatre was full. This
time, the whole Alpha team was present, along with Sam and the other team leaders,
including the Canadian Colonel, and his team leader Major. Lacey and Brown were
also present, as were their Canadian counterparts. Greer and Miriam were seated
behind their superiors. In effect, everyone from Major up was here, and
everyone close to me.

On the wall used for flat screens and hollo
projection, were the faces of those not able to be here in person. General
Harriman, David Tollin, and Eric Nielsen, looked down on us.

I let Annabelle and Jack run the briefing
as they had before, and stood where I could see everyone.

There were no questions this time. Just
silent people absorbing information. It's possible the lower ranks didn’t feel
like they could ask questions, but I'd have expected extrovert personalities
like the twins and BA to ask if they wanted an answer to something, and they
didn’t.

The silence continued after the last vid
was watched, and the last word said. I looked around the room. This was a group
of the most experienced military and exploration people from the whole spine. And
the task before us left them completely silent?

Finally I felt it necessary to induce some
movement.

"I suggest everyone breaks up into
their own groups and discusses what we think we should be doing to prepare.
Submit any ideas, suggestions, questions, strategy, and tactics, whatever; up
your chain of command. The four stars will meet in a few hours' time to discuss
what people come up with."

Looking at their faces, I wasn’t too
hopeful anything useful was going to come of it. Which would leave the people
at the top to actually come up with all the responses. Personally, I wasn’t
sure that was the best idea either. At the top, you tended to lose sight of the
mud at the bottom of the trenches, and it was the mud which would define how
successful we would be against prophesy.

"Thank you all for coming."

I turned to the faces on the wall.

Bring Eric's ship with you. He will want
his family with him.

I ignored the voice, and looked at Walter.

"General, can you have anyone you want
to come with us to Outback ready to go as soon as we arrive? There's
accommodation for you on Unassailable, where all the delegations are
quartered."

"We'll be ready."

"Jane will be in touch when the four
stars meeting will be. Give us a couple of hours to digest things."

"I've missed these little get
together's of yours," he said with a grin, before his face winked out.

"David, you better bring your family
with you."

"Already ready. I just need a ship,
unless you intend docking?"

"No, I'm not docking. The timing will
be too damn close to lose any time at all."

"Got that right Jon. It's bad enough
having to wait for the Door to open to confront a Keeper finally, but having to
wait for you to get here as well? That’s intolerable!"

He said it with a huge grin on his face, but
in actual fact, he was spot on. If I’d been waiting for him, I'd have expressed
the same thing. His face blinked out.

"Eric, I hope you don’t mind being
used as a taxi service?"

"No problems. I thought we'd be using
shuttles though."

"Kali wants you and your ship with
us."

"Does she now. I wonder why."

"No idea, yet. Do you know Jessie Ball?"

"Sure. Haven't seen her in donkey's
years, as we usually work different ends of the spine. Why?"

"She's on board, with her ship, a
brand new Camel. Could be Kali has something for you both to do soon."

"I'm in. Perhaps we'll finally be able
to scan the Outback system properly?"

"Maybe so. We'll get told when we get
told."

"I get told regularly."

We both chuckled.

"Anyway," he continued, "after
I see this magical archive of yours, and your computer collection."

"Yes. Bring your family as well."

"Ah. Okay, I’d not considered that. Just
as well you're not here for a bit. The missus is going to want to move most of
what we just finished moving onto the station, back aboard Nascaspider. Not
sure if she'll be pleased or not. She made a big fuss of moving in the first
place."

"Good luck with that. Can you be the
taxi for the General and his people, and also David and his family?"

"No problemo. You will slow down
enough for me to dock safely? Or should I simply load up as fast as possible
and meet you at Outback Orbital?"

I thought for a moment, doing the math, but
another thought intruded. For my next Carrier, I needed to make sure Corvettes
at least, could dock using the front door. Maybe Frigates too. The need to
scoop at speed was sometimes necessary, and the ones I most needed to dock,
couldn’t do so at speed.

"If the General and David can be ready
in time, go for Outback Orbital. Dock as soon as we arrive, on the right side
Flight Deck entrance. Tag'Em is in the left. David will give you the exact
timing. I'm hoping to arrive as soon as I can before the Door officially opens,
but we're cutting it awful close. Jane will know as soon as you leave the
station, so I don’t need to be told. Just be there before us, or be waiting on
the line between the Bad Wolf jump point and the Outback jump point."

"Will do. See you soon."

His face vanished as well. I looked around
and found only two people left. Both of them were grinning like Cheshire cats.
The lock on the door clicked. The cats shed their fur. I sighed heavily, but
gave in to fate.

"So," began Bigglesworth.
"Jon. What's your feeling on where and when prophesy will manifest?"

"Honestly? If it’s a celestial event,
then through one of the four side systems. Most likely the ones in Corporate
and Canadian space, because they are on the core-ward side of the arm, and I'd
expect an event of the magnitude we expect, to come from the core itself,
expanding outward."

"And if it's an invasion?" asked
Patton.

"If it's an invasion, it will be
through a jump point we know nothing about yet. As such, it could be any of
them."

"Can we narrow it down at all?"
asked Walter, with us again via vid.

We were in the original Deck One Conference
Room, which Jane had redecorated to have a smaller table, but about half the
room devoted to lounge chairs. Conferences tended to happen in the newer and
larger room made during the refit, so this one was now outfitted more as a
Senior Officers Conference room.

"Possibly," I said. "I'm
currently building the AMS a new Drone Cruiser for use as an Explorer ship. The
idea is instead of scouring a system using one ship and one jump point
detector, you use a big ship and dozens of drones, each with a detector. Once
it's ready, I'll ask John to test it in each of our six suspect sectors. If we
find additional jump points in any one of them, the threat level can be raised
there."

"But you don’t like this idea for some
reason," stated Price.

"You noticed. Damn, I was trying to
keep my game face on. I guess it needs work."

They all chuckled.

"Yes, I have reservations. On the one
hand, we need to know if there are more jump points or not, since a threat
coming from somewhere we can't anticipate will be significantly harder to
counter. On the other hand, if we find more systems, we may be able to gain a
bigger buffer zone when something shows up."

I paused, and they waited for me.

"On the gripping hand though,
discovering new jump points leading to new systems, may bring on what we fear
most. We may actually discover a phobic alien species, or a virulent disease,
or something we can't even imagine. So we might trigger prophesy, just by
trying to quantify it."

"What's this gripping hand you
mention?" asked
Tremblay.

"Sorry. Three armed alien, from a book I once read. It
stuck in my mind, and it comes out whenever there are three options. The alien
had two arms on one side of the body, both with tool using hands, and a single
much larger arm on the other side, fitted with a gripping hand for heavy
lifting. One hand," I waved my right hand high, "other hand," I
waved my right hand low, "gripping hand," I balled my left hand into
a fist.

I grinned, but only Price really understood it. Unlike so
many, it had been one book to constantly be republished across six hundred
years. Its sequel on the other hand was much harder to come across.

"So you think we may trigger prophesy
by trying to quantify it?" asked Jedburgh.

"It's possible."

"It bothers you, but not enough to
argue against not doing it," stated Walter.

I waggled my head from side to side a
couple of times.

"Yeah. I can't help feeling like we
already triggered it, and while the possibilities exist, exploring further
won't actually make anything worse. But I can't quantify this at all. It's just
a gut feeling."

"Maybe when we hear what the Prophesy
is," said Patton, "we'll understand it all better."

"I really hope so!" I exclaimed.

"I wondered if there was something
more we could do to define the vector the threat is coming from?" asked
Bigglesworth.

"You had a suggestion?" asked
Price.

"I was wondering if Jon's nightmare
could be used to define the system somehow."

"I could make up models of the six
systems," offered Jane through coms. "Jon could then watch a motion
display of how each system looks through a period of time, looking for
something to become familiar to him. But it would require a ship to visit each
system, and gather the data. It would likely be a month or more before I had
all the data I needed."

"Worth doing," I said.
"Assuming we have a month. Get on it."

"Confirmed."

"The twins can view them too. They've
seen the nightmare enough now to know the basic scene when they see it."

"Twins?" asked Tremblay.

"My Major's Peck. Joint team leaders
for my Marine Team One. We have some weird bond which defies explanation at
this point. Whenever I have prophesy based nightmares, both of them see them as
well."

He didn’t look like he understood, but I
wasn’t going to discuss it further.

Four star eyes met across the room, and
settled on me.

"No," I said.

They all laughed.

"Sorry Jon," said Bigglesworth.
"But one day that no will have to be yes."

"May that day be a long way off
then."

"No argument. But that wasn’t what I
wanted to ask you."

"Shoot."

"Assume for the moment all our
sector's military assets were under your command, and you had no-one else to
fall back on to make deployment decisions. How would you deploy to face what we
are guessing is coming?"

I sighed. If they wanted to play this game,
I guess I could oblige.

"First, I'd divide my forces in half.
The first half go to the Famine system, on the watch for an incursion from
Death. Should one occur, they would jump into Pestilence and get as much
information as possible, before falling back to a better fighting position.

They nodded.

"The other half of my forces would
again be divided in half. One half would remain in Nexus, bolstering the
existing garrison. The other half would go to Dead Man's Chest."

More nods.

"I'd send the entire British fleet to
Victoria, to support the Canadian Fleet. The American fleet would be divided in
half. One half would also go to Victoria, and the other half to Nexus."

"And where would you be?" asked
Bigglesworth.

"Depends on any new jump points found.
When Slice's new Cruiser is complete, its first job will be rescanning Nexus.
Eric Nielsen has been remapping the entire Australian sector for the last six
months, and found exactly zero new. But the new drone Cruiser should be able to
cover even further out than has been done anywhere to date."

"That didn’t answer the
question," said Walter, with a grin.

"If we find a new jump point in Nexus,
most likely I'll be there. If they don’t, I'll be in Famine."

"And how do you see each scenario
playing out?" asked Bigglesworth.

I guess he was the senior four star. I’d
never actually checked who had the seniority here. All I knew was I was the
junior as far as time in rank was concerned.

"If the threat comes through Nexus,
the fleet fights to contain as long as possible at the emergence point. If
containment isn’t possible, the remains of my fleet will fall back to Outback
if possible. The remains of the American fleet fall back to Bad Wolf, and run a
harassment retreat for as long as they can."

I looked around the room at them all.

"If they come through Nexus, the
Australian sector is lost, and probably most people will die. I don’t see any
other way the scenario will play out. If we have any warning, we may be able to
save all the stations and whoever is on them at the time, but nothing much
else."

Walter nodded. I guess he'd come to the
same conclusion.

"If this happens, my guess is I'll die
at the Outback jump point, and it will fall to all of you to try and save your
people."

Walter nodded again. My guess is he would
be on the best Australian sector ship they could build before then, and would
go down fighting before the Sydney jump point.

Our eyes met for a moment.

"If the threat comes through Victoria,
I'm sorry to say the Canadian system is likely a lost cause. Once again, we
might be able to save some stations from the close systems, but I’d see
whatever fleet is there falling back into Vancouver fairly rapidly."

I looked at Tremblay.

"I'm sorry, but you lucked out if they
come that way. One small sector is not sufficient reason for mounting a last
stand, when all it does is reduce our fighting capacity for the battles me
might win later. Or at least have a decent chance of delay, while people escape
another bottleneck."

"I know," he said. "It is
still difficult to hear it said."

I sighed again, and nodded to him.

"The combined fleet divides in half,
falling back to Seattle, and Hawaii. After that, it depends entirely on where
the threat heads. In the meantime, my fleet in Dead Man's Chest heads for
Hawaii as fast as they can go, at which time, some American elements can be
released to reinforce Seattle, or if need be, San Francisco."

Patton and Jedburgh swapped eye contact.

"It depends then on where the threat
goes. If it heads down spine, we block at which ever two systems we can, and
let it go. It becomes Earth sector's problem, at least until they lose. The
time might give us a chance to build some fixed defenses. I've a few ideas, but
not really thought about them yet. If the threat comes up spine, we fall back
as slowly as possible, getting as many people out as we can. If it comes to it,
we make a stand in Midnight and Bad Wolf. I have a wild idea about the latter,
but will need some expert help to develop it."

The nods were back.

"If they come through the Corporate
sector, its Earth's problem until it gets to Jamaica, where we meet it with
everything we have."

The nods were getting annoying.

"If it comes through Dead Man's Chest,
my fleet retreats to Jamaica, the fleet in Victoria head there as fast as they
can, and we attempt to block them there, Bermuda, and Hawaii. The fleet in
Nexus will attempt to get there as fast as possible, and wherever the fleets
meet up, whoever is senior will have to decide where to block, and if it's
worth trying to block in more than one place. We won't know, until there is
actual data on the threat's capabilities."

"If it's this end of the spine and I'm
at the other end, I'll be doing a speed run back here. By the time I reach the
combat zones, I'll know enough to decide if I try to push through, or I join
Earth sector in blocking their advance that way. No way to tell at this point.
But if at all possible, I will try to make it back."

They'd given up nodding and were just
staring at me now.

"If they come through Death, I'll meet
them in the Pestilence system for long enough to determine capabilities, before
retreating into Famine, where the rest of my fleet will be. We'll hit them hard
as they down jump, and if possible, retreat. War presents some interesting
defense possibilities, if we have the time to develop them. Assuming an orderly
retreat is possible, I'll head up spine bolstering whatever local defense there
is, but without unduly risking my force. The sectors at the core end of the
spine are the weakest in terms of defensive capability, and lack of belief.
They won't be ready. I predict the Latin sector will be lost without any real
defense deployed, while the African sector will be overrun pretty quickly, but
because it has a second spine system, it's likely some people will escape."

"The Japanese will fight, but they
specialized in smaller ships. It's impossible to tell what ship class will be
the winner, and which the loser. Like the Actor class proved inadequate for the
Midgard war, we won't know until it's too late, what kind of ship will be the
most effective. The Japs may be able to hold long enough to get their people
out, especially as they will have a real warning. The other sectors down there
have had enough warning, and seem to be taking things seriously, but like the
Japs, they only have limited fleets, and their main task is going to be
evacuation for as long as their spine systems remain untaken."

"The sectors around Earth Sector will
most likely join forces with Earth's fleet. How effective they will be is
anyone's guess. Both German fleets will fight. But by that time, doing anything
but rear-guarding the refugees will be pointless. Most likely they will lose a
percentage of their fleets before they reach Jamaica, where we will be waiting
to take over the rear-guard action. Where I'll be by then is anyone's guess,
but I seriously doubt I'll make it that far."

"What do we do from Jamaica on?"
asked Price.

"As I said before. Fall back as you
see fit, and make a stand before the Australian sector. By then, hopefully,
we’ll have come up with a way of stopping the threat cold, and we dig in there,
and the human race continues locked into just Australian space."

"And if it's some sort of cosmic
event?"

"Then we're all shit out of luck, and
it’s a matter of fall back as we can, and hope we can save enough people to
keep a viable civilization going somewhere it misses."