Smith's Monthly #5 Page 22

And forty-five minutes later, after a wonderful meal of poultry with light garlic sauce, fresh bread, and steamed sweet green vegetables she had never seen before but fell in love with on first bite, they were back in the control room.

  Under cloak they headed for General Jarvis’s fleet and she could feel the excitement of a coming fight start to fill her. This man had attacked her home and luckily failed. She was so looking forward to stopping him.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  “DAMN IT,” Mattie said, more to herself than anyone.

  Red understood exactly how she was feeling. They were both at their stations in the control room and he did not like what was happening with Jarvis’s fleet. It was not what he and Mattie had predicted would happen.

  Or at least not all of it.

  Jarvis was splitting up his ships.

  The passenger liner and ten of the fighters headed off on the path that he and Mattie predicted the fleet would take around the nebula and toward Bodie Station.

  Another ten of his military ships headed in almost exactly the opposite direction around the nebula. It would take those ships almost three days longer than the first part of the fleet to get around the nebula and back into Sector space. And they would be nowhere near the Bodie Station.

  Red had no idea at all why General Jarvis would do that.

  And ten more of the fleet’s ships simply stayed at the old abandoned station, including the largest battle cruiser.

  And all the ships remained manned and seemingly ready to fight. And worse yet, there was no way of telling from the scans which ship carried General Jarvis.

  Mattie shoved her chair back with another couple of swear words, stood, and started to pace. She was angry, very angry right at that moment. And making the most dangerous enforcer in all of the Sector Force angry was never a good idea.

  Red had moved their ship up to within striking distance of the old station and put them into a position of hiding. He took what readings he could, made sure their cloak was firm and they couldn’t be scanned in any way, then turned his chair around so he could face where she was pacing.

  He was smart enough to not say anything, even though he wanted to. At this point it was her conversation to start. And he was willing to wait.

  Finally she dropped into her chair again and just sighed. “This is one tricky bastard.”

  Red decided it was best to only nod.

  “He managed to elude the Sector Force for years, almost destroy the Sector Force, and now that we think we know where he is, he’s managing to try to get away again.”

  “He’s not going to get away,” Red said.

  “And if we blow up all those ships out there,” she said, “how are we going to know he’s actually dead and not just hiding somewhere in the second sector running this like a puppet show?”

  “We wouldn’t,” Red said. “Which is why we are not going in and just blowing up ships.”

  “We’ve got to watch this monster die,” Mattie said, staring off at the ceiling.

  “And we will,” Red said. “We both will. He killed my best friend and thousands and thousands of others. He’s not getting away.”

  Suddenly the Mattie he had come to know was back in her eyes and under control. She stared at him. “Suggestions?”

  “We stay with the original plan,” Red said. “This ship is fast enough to deal with it all. We jab a stick into this nest and see where everyone swarms. And that will tell us where the General is. Then we can go in and clean him out.”

  “One ship against thirty?” Mattie said, shaking her head.

  He laughed. “Yeah, they don’t stand a chance, do they?”

  For a second she looked at him and then smiled. “You’re right. We do this right and they don’t.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  MATTIE WAS MANNING the laser beam controls as Red eased their cloaked ship up behind a small patrol ship in the eleven ships heading directly toward Bodie Station.

  She could feel the tension in the control room because both of them knew that if this didn’t work they were in trouble. The idea was to knock out a ship’s engine without destroying it and making it seem like the ship only had engine trouble. That way they could disable ships and never have anyone in the fleets know they were even there.

  And the hoped-for result would be that the communications after a ship or two seemingly broke down would be that General Jarvis would reveal which ship he was on. So they had all the fleet ships monitored and were ready on that front as well.

  “In position,” Red said, nodding to her.

  Red was the one piloting the ship, doing the tricky cloaked approaches to the other ships. Her job was to fire the laser that would disable the engine of the target ship and monitor the communication as Red got them out of the danger area.

  She fired the laser, just a very short and intense burst.

  “Done.”

  Red slowly eased their ship back and to one side.

  Nothing showed on the monitor and for a moment nothing seemed to happen. What they hoped was that the laser would burn out parts of the ship’s engines, melt it, and cause it to shut down.

  Mattie wasn’t sure if it had worked or not. She carefully watched the screen and the monitors.

  Then the ship they had fired on started to drift slightly and Red quickly pulled his ship even farther back and out of the way.

  She did a quick reading. The target’s engine was down. From the looks of it, frozen solid.

  There were six people on board, and from her scans, three of them went back to the engine area while the other three stayed in the control area.

  The chatter over the communications systems seemed pretty normal, but slightly angry. Clearly they had expected some breakdowns in the old ships, but not one so soon after leaving the base.

  “One down,” Red said, smiling as he turned the ship and headed for the other group of ships going the long way around.

  “Keep an eye out on how they handle that problem,” he said. “We’ll be in position to give them yet another headache in thirty minutes.”

  “Think of it as a toothache,” Mattie said, watching and monitoring the chatter between the dead ship and the others. “We’re just extracting them one at a time.”

  “To make sure the General has no bite left,” Red said, laughing.

  “Exactly,” she said.

  Thirty minutes later Red had matched the speeds of the other small fleet taking the long way into the Second Sector. He had decided on a larger attack-style ship to one side of the fleet as the target this time.

  The first ship they had crippled still floated in space and no one had turned back for the crew or come from the station to help them yet. The life support systems on that ship would hold those men for almost a month, so they were fine.

  “In position,” Red said.

  Again she fired the laser, this time just a little longer since the ship they were crippling had a larger and more contained engine.

  “Finished,” she said.

  Red immediately eased them back and away from the ship.

  Again, Mattie couldn’t tell anything had happened at first. Then after almost thirty seconds the ship seemed to lose ground with the acceleration of the others and drifted back.

  “Oh, that got them upset,” Mattie said, laughing at all the chatter over the communications links. There were almost two dozen crew on the ship they had just stopped and she had a hunch that another ship would swing back and pick them up. The General just couldn’t lose that many men out of such a small force.

  She listened intently, trying to get any hint of the location of the general. But orders didn’t seem to be coming from any ship directly. And nothing was coming from the passenger liner traveling with the other group.

  After five minutes she turned to Red. “No sign. Nothing. But wow are they all unhappy.”

  He shrugged. “So let’s make them a little more unhappy,” Red said.

  He eased back around to the other side of the
slowly accelerating fleet and came up behind the largest ship in this group. And the only one with private cabins of any sort. Mattie figured that if the general was in this group, he would be on that ship in the private cabins.

  “Ready,” Red said after a moment.

  She again fired the laser slightly longer than the last time, directing the invisible beam right into the engine of the big ship. No metal was going to withstand that kind of heat. A large area of that engine had just become slag.

  “Done,” she said the moment she let up on the trigger.

  Red pulled them up and away, moving a distance off to the side of the small fleet.

  The big ship started to drop back and then all hell broke loose on the communications channels between the ships.

  Mattie put it over the control room system so Red could hear. They both listened for any clue as to the location of the general.

  There was a lot of fear, a great deal of anger, and some military types clearly in control and very, very upset.

  But no sign of the general breaking in to give orders.

  After fifteen minutes Mattie looked into Red’s worried eyes. She could tell he was thinking the same thing.

  They had forced three major ships in the two fleets to break down dead in space and the General had not said a word

  General Jarvis was not out here.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  RED COULDN’T BELIEVE the general hadn’t said a word after losing three major ships from his attack fleet. That made no sense at all. Had he and Mattie been completely wrong about the general hiding on this side of the nebula?

  Mattie had gone back to pacing as Red turned the ship toward the group of ships with the passenger liner. That liner would be their next target; see what happened then.

  “Maybe his men are too afraid to tell him what is happening,” Red said.

  “Possible,” Mattie said.

  She did two more quick paces back and forth of the control room and then dropped into her chair again.

  She brought up the ten ships in the fleet heading directly around the nebula for Bodie Station. “We take out the passenger liner and we’ll know for certain.”

  Red agreed with her. “It’s going to take twenty-five more minutes for us to get close enough to those ships. How about you monitor and I go get us a couple of juices and pieces of bread from the galley?”

  She nodded. “Thanks.”

  But he could tell she wasn’t really in her mind completely. She was having the same worry that General Jarvis had duped them once again and that the Sector Force was still in danger.

  Red had no doubt that Jarvis was clever enough to set up this kind of ruse.

  But why?

  He kept asking himself that question over and over all the way to the galley and back. And by the time he got back, he had an idea as to why.

  He handed her a glass of juice and a slice of the white bread. “Anything?”

  “Nothing but anger at the mechanics and so on,” she said. “There is no hint at all that they were attacked.”

  They were still ten minutes from being close enough to the fleet and the passenger liner before he would have to take control and get them into position.

  On the screen the ten ships retained formation, filling in the gap left by the one ship they had disabled out of this group. All the warships were around the passenger liner, as if protecting it.

  It looked perfect. Too perfect as far as Red was concerned.

  On his big screen he brought up an image of the entire area, showing the line of the two fleets around the nebula curtain, Bodie Station on one side and the Three-Planet Alliance where the other fleet would reenter Sector Two space.

  Red pointed to small fleets of ships with the passenger liner headed for Bodie Station. “What’s going to happen to those fleets if they go charging into those areas now?”

  “They are going to be blown out of space,” Mattie said. “Chief Lovell on Bodie plus other ships with Sector Force and Innocence Inc. agents will make sure none of those ships make it through. That’s why we’re trying to figure out where the General is before that happens.”

  “Exactly,” Red said. He pointed to the other fleet of ships.”

  “What about those.”

  She looked up and saw exactly where their path was going to take them. “The Three-Planet Alliance fleet will make short work of them. If I remember right, they had a run-in with General Jarvis when he was still in power on his home world.”

  “Exactly,” Red said. Then he pointed to the ships remaining at the old space station, some of which were nothing but hulls that would never move again. “And those?”

  She shrugged. “Someone would quickly wipe them out along with the old station.”

  She looked over at him. “So what are you saying? That all this is a ruse?”

  “I’m pretty sure it is,” Red said.

  “But why?” Mattie asked, shaking her head.

  “Because the only way the general is ever going to escape the Sector Force is by having everyone think he is dead.”

  “I understand that, but where would he go?”

  “I have a couple ideas on that,” Red said as he took over controls of the ship again and started to ease it in behind the passenger liner surrounded by the fleet of attack ships. “But let’s see if he really isn’t on this liner and then talk about that.”

  She nodded and went back to monitoring all the communications and getting another charge built up in the laser.

  Eight minutes later Red said “Ready and in position.”

  “Firing,” she said. Then a moment later she said, “Done.”

  He quickly pulled his ship up and away from the fleet. With normal, modern warships, he never would have been able to get a cloaked ship in that close. But these ships were far from modern nor were they manned in a normal fashion.

  As they watched, the liner lost its acceleration, maintaining the speed it had been going.

  Mattie looked at Red. “Passenger liner is now adrift. Engines gone.”

  She made the communications from the different fleet ships fill the command area. Red made one more check to make sure they were clear and completely cloaked. Then he sat back to listen.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  RED HAD POINTED OUT to her how these two small ragtag fleets were going to be easily destroyed as soon as they neared Sector space on the other side of the nebula curtain.

  She understood that completely. The only reason that General Jarvis would move toward Bodie Station was by thinking he still controlled the station. But if that had been the case and his plan, he would have taken every ship he could with him, not divide them into three small fleets assured to be destroyed.

  Unless he wanted them destroyed.

  And now she and Red had disabled the passenger liner and there was still no sign of General Jarvis. Not one word from him.

  There was no doubt in Mattie’s mind that he was not on the ships. Or on the abandoned station or any ship remaining there.

  But he wanted people with this ploy to think he was killed. If that was the case, where was he?

  She banged her hand down on the edge of her chair and shut off the communication chatter from the fleet ships. The fleet had only paused for a moment, then gone around and kept going toward Bodie Station, leaving the passenger liner drifting along with the first ship they had disabled. Life support on both vessels was enough to last for over a month, so for the moment they were fine.

  “So where is he?” she asked.

  Red shrugged, but I have a way we might find out and save all these people and their families in the process.”

  “You think all this crew is working under threats on their families?” Mattie asked.

  “It’s the general’s mode of operation and can you see any other reason why these ships will continue onward knowing it’s a suicide mission?”

  “I agree,” she said. “So Mister Innocence Inc., how do we save all of them and their fam
ilies and find out where the general is located?”

  “We ask them,” Red said, smiling at her.

  “You don’t think General Jarvis is going to be monitoring all their communications?” She just sort of stared at him. He had lost his mind.

  “Oh, I would bet anything he’s listening to everything they are saying from wherever he’s at, more than likely through relays. That’s why they have to just keep going forward no matter what happens to any ship.”

  “And chances are those ships are scheduled to explode at some point so there will be no survivors,” she said, pointing at the ships on the screen that they had disabled. “There can’t be any survivors of any of this.”

  Red looked very concerned, but nodded. “I would believe the same. Which means we can’t try any sort of rescue until we have the general in custody or very dead.”

  “We could do that if we knew what stone he was hiding under.”

  “So we ask the people on these ships where he is at.”

  Suddenly she realized what he was thinking. “Short band intercom?” she asked. “Ship to ship with no range?”

  “Exactly,” he said, nodding. “Sure can’t hurt to try at this point.”

  She sat back in her chair, staring at the screen. It just might work.

  She turned to Red. “Let’s write down carefully what we plan to say and what we need from them besides the General’s location.”

  Red smiled. “And we need to tell them the exact situation they are flying into. And that they don’t have to if they act quickly.”

  She grabbed her pad and started working on the message.

  Beside her she saw him turn back to the controls and ease them in toward one of the fleet ships still heading toward Bodie Station so they would be close enough to send a message that the General would never hear, no matter what rock he was hiding under.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  MATTIE WORKED OVER the message, making sure it say completely and efficiently what she needed it to say to the crew of the small fleets of ships heading to guaranteed destruction. She and Red had decided they were going to try the message on the fleet headed for Bodie Station first, then if that worked, go and repeat it on the ships left at the abandoned space station and the ships headed toward the Three-Planets Alliance.