This Starry Deep (18 page)

Chapter 31 - Jonah

WE WERE AT PEACE. Surprisingly easy to arrange, as a matter of fact. Once Tslakog’s people stopped shooting, Bushfield stopped firing and held her people back. Mostly they were confused. If you pressed her on it, I know she’d admit she didn’t want to kill anyone in the process of surrender, either. Which wasn’t what was going on, either, but hey.

The important part remained that the shooting stopped long enough for me to tell Bushfield the score, and to ensure that no one outside of the battle group knew. That felt important to me. Hodges was up to something. I could tell.

Ships like the
Washburne
don’t pop into battlefield situations with no ready support. There were no support ships anywhere. I’d sent my own guys, untrained and scared, to rescue damaged
Washburne
escape pods. They’d performed fantastically, according to Bushfield, but there should have been medical out there. There still wasn’t. I kept chewing on the problem, but until I figured it out, I wanted to keep Hodges in the dark.

Then there was the problem of Shae. If the Tsyfarians didn’t have her - and I really found myself convinced of that - where could she be? Of course, I also had to work out how to get the Tsyfarian migration back on track without leveling more civilizations. Looked to be a full day.

My problem was figuring out what to solve first. The Tsyfarian invasion wave threatened the most lives. The Hodges issue came a close second. None of it mattered in the face of Shae. Could I put her first, though, and risk everyone else? If she could talk to me she’d tell me no, of course. But listening to her about this sort of thing didn’t tend to be my strong point.

Which left me nowhere, still. So, Shae. Where was she? The Tsyfarians didn’t have her, but someone did. Why would they take her and why did Hodges—

Everything fell into place. Or close enough. Hodges called me to get involved. I said no. Not long after, Shae vanishes and it looks like a Tsyfarian abduction. Except when it happened, we didn’t know the Tsyfarians. Hodges told me what it was and I went along, not knowing any better. There wasn’t a good reason to mistrust him, then.

But all I’d had to go on was his word. And this was a guy who had refused to send proper support to his own field operation. He hadn’t wanted me to come out here, either. Almost as if he was setting it up to fail.

But then why involve me at all? I’d have to ask him. I intended to ask hard. But if he’d kidnapped Shae, it would make sense. Mistake number one. He knew it’d get me into action. He’d also counted, I guessed, on being able to control me. Mistake number two.

For whatever reason, he seemed to want to make a show of stopping the invasion but also to fail. What he’d managed to do, though, was give me everything I needed. All of the pieces fell into place and I saw a plan.

I clicked my comm unit and saw a queue of family-encoded bursts waiting. I keyed them. Sure enough, Shae. Just a location and ship designation and extraction request. She was on the
Dozier
. Chances were, when I last stood on the ship Shae’d been nearby. I didn’t bother to listen to the rest of the messages, fuming. Hodges had faked concern while he held my wife prisoner on the very ship we discussed her rescue on.

And now she had escaped, at least enough to send a message. Knowing Shae, it meant there was a lot of smoke on the
Dozier
. She asked for extraction: a pickup, not a save. I gave it a bit more thought. What were the chances our little Newt had joined her? Pretty good: he was a smart kid, and she would’ve pinged us both with that burst. He’d be on the way, too, if not already there.

I sent a location ping but got nothing off of him, which meant he’d gone dark. Which, to me, meant he was already on the
Dozier
. So one of my missed signals was from him, that much felt clear to me. Regardless, I was certainly on my way now.

I saw a way that might solve all of my problems, or at least delay one of them a bit longer to my advantage. I asked the Tsyfarian guard nearest me to tell Tslakog I needed to speak to him. They’d let me roam mostly free around the ship while I considered their problem, but with a guard always shadowing me. Luckily, this was one of the few who spoke English.

While waiting for Tslakog, I keyed Bushfield.

“Deep Water this is Jonah, copy.”

“Jonah, any more peace treaties for me to agree to? I have the afternoon free, it seems.”

“Cute. Listen, I need a favor.”

“Name it, Captain,” she said. I could hear her smirk over the hiss of the radio.

“Don’t call me—”

“You’re an easy mark.”

“And you’re in a good mood, with all this chatting,” I said.

“No more of my people are dying. We’re not actively having to shoot anyone. That sort of thing calls for celebration today. Do you know how long I’ve been in this ship? I think my ass is fused with the—”

“I’ll make sure a med tech takes a good look at your ass later, Bushfield. I still need that favor,” I reminded her.

“Make sure the med is cute. What’s the favor?”

“In a little while you’ll see activity. The sort that might make you open fire. Do me a favor and don’t.”

I waited, listing to silence for longer than I liked before she came back on. “What are you up to, Jonah?”

“I can’t tell you. You’ll know it when you see it.”

“That hardly sounds good.”

“It isn’t,” I admitted, “but trust me.”

“Jonah—”

“Gotta go, thanks, Bushfield. Jonah out.” I turned to a different frequency before she broke in to tell me off. She wouldn’t want to help, not when this went down, but she would stay out of my way. I was certain of that. Pretty certain.

Flipping the frequency over landed me on something else I’d planned as an emergency measure. The ship with Bee and the others had a backup communications unit. Before I’d left, I’d switched it to a frequency. The same one I stopped on now.

“Bee, this is Jonah. Copy.”

Silence. I tried again and waited. Nothing. Either they’d been shot down - no, Bushfield would have told me - or they’d blown out the main comm unit and resorted to the backup, changing the frequency. I started to run down a list of alternate ways to get their attention when my comm unit crackled.

“Jonah?” Bee’s voice said. There was a garble and pop to it - the backup unit on that ship wasn’t great, but it would do.

“Hey, you guys all accounted for?”

“We are,” she said, and I could hear banging, “this backup communications unit, did you set it before—”

“I left? Yes. That’s not important—”

“It’s crap,” I think she said. “Do you need a pickup? Where are you?”

“I’ll be near where the main fighting took place soon enough. I want you to follow. Just that. Follow,” I said, hoping she could understand me through the interference of that backup useless unit. “At the rear, got me? Keep your main communications array on the normal frequency until you start to follow, then switch it over to this one so we can hear each other. Copy that, Bee?”

“Enough to work it out. But what will we be following?”

“You’ll know when you see it. Jonah out.”

Near the end of that exchange, Tslakog came in. He waited while I finished, without interrupting or drawing attention to himself. A leader who respected the people working for him. I really liked this guy.

“Now, Tslakog,” I said, turning to him, “it’s time to move this whole fleet.”

“Yes?” he sounded surprised. “You have found a solution to our problems so quickly?”

“Not quite,” I admitted, “but I need to prove a point.”

“You need our entire fleet to prove a point? Jonah, this does not sound prudent.”

“It isn’t, but it will get you a solution to your problem and get me one to mine.”

He sighed a reptilian sort of sigh and nodded. “Is there risk to my people?”

“Of course. But minimal. Our forces will not attack, I promise,” an empty promise, to be fair. I knew that Bushfield wouldn’t attack, but further down the line it could get messy. I’d do my best not to let that happen, but I also knew Tslakog wouldn’t agree if he knew the whole truth. A small lie and reasonable risk in exchange for Shae was all right by me.

“I shall recall the fighter group,” he said.

“No,” I said, stopping him before he could turn to start the recall. “We’ll catch up with them soon enough. We need to go right through the battlefield, at full speed.”

“Full speed?” he asked. His eyes got wide. I’d seen that look on countless people in my career. Often when I started to tell them my plans. I considered it a good sign.

If my allies were shocked by what I had in store, chances were my enemy wouldn’t see it (and, by extension, me) coming either. That sort of advantage was priceless.

“Full damned speed.”

Chapter 32 - Jonah

THE TSYFARIAN FLEET tore through the sky. Looming, the fleet looked to perch above the battle that we had all finally stopped. The simple presence of the body of ships, moving at such a speed, threatened to ignite hostilities again.

Bushfield would see this and hopefully realize at least enough of my plan to not open fire. I couldn’t key her again, though. Everyone would be listening in. Bad enough I’d given her any warning at all. That ran a dumb amount of risk. Doing it twice was going out of my way to ask for trouble.

Of course, it could be argued that leading an invasion fleet against my own people was asking for trouble. But anyone who’d argue that would never understand the fine art of negotiation.

We reached the battleground and kept going. I saw telemetry of the battle groups reacting. Bushfield pulled the human forces out of the way, rabbiting to a clear distance quickly. The Tsyfarian forces fell in line with us the way I’d asked.

Bee and her tiny crew unfolded from Bushfield’s scatter pattern and fell in line with the fleet as it ripped by. They fit into the pattern we built, as far back as they could, and I grinned. They were getting the idea.

Bushfield keyed me twice, but I ignored her. I waited for a much bigger fish to ask me to the dance. Meanwhile, Bushfield, realizing that this had to be me and torn between all of her options, had her group follow us. They didn’t join our formation, or even get too close, but they followed us. Just in case.

I couldn’t fault her idea. If everything I did was on the up and up, she would be close enough to help. If not, her group was close enough to start firing again. Either way, she both had us covered and had ensured she wouldn’t get left out of next phase of this madness. She might be sick of being in that cockpit and having to get refueled and restocked along the way, but she didn’t intend to stop now.

Neither did I. At top speed, we wouldn’t reach Hodges and the
Dozier
for quite a while. But we were pointed right at him. The
Dozier
wasn’t equipped to make a speedy escape, either. As Hodges’s command center, it should have been slowly making its way right toward us. Surrounding it would be a full support fleet of smaller ships that could run. But with command-class ships like the
Dozier
, you had a general on board who demanded a certain style and air of respectability for diplomatic missions, such a ship’s main function. So when it found itself preparing for a fight, everything tumbled around. They had to retrofit whole sections, fuel up, and coordinate everyone else trying to do the same thing. It left them vulnerable - something people had taken advantage of in the past, to varied success. Normally a fighter squad around the command ship would suffice. Not this time.

We passed through the battlefield and kept going. I asked the Tsyfarian near me to open a wide communications channel to the
Dozier
. We requested confirmation from the ship and got no reply. Strange. I could see, patched in to my own display, that the connection sat open. They just couldn’t respond.

I laughed. Their signal had been encrypted and locked from the inside. They could receive messages but not send, not without the proper override. That meant Shae. I thought about what code she might use and tried a few family ones to no success.

Then I thought of an old one we’d used years and years ago. I sent it and the channel opened. But only that channel. I kept them locked down otherwise. Shae must’ve had her reasons.

“
Dozier
,” I said, keying the channel, “this is Jonah Madison. Get Hodges on the line. Priority one.”

“Captain Madison?” the voice on the other end asked. “Where are you broadcasting from? General Hodges is—”

“Hodges is going to jump on this line and he’ll do it fast. I tell you what,” I said, “I’ll put this call on hold for a full minute. When I come back on the line, if Hodges isn’t here…well, he’ll want to be.”

I nodded at the tech and left the room. My communications remained slaved to the Tsyfarians. I set my thinsuit for space and strapped my GravPack on tight. They cycled an airlock for me and I floated free, a speck in the vastness of space.

Wrapping a gravity shield around myself as tight as I could, I lashed the pack to the nearest planet in a straight line to the
Dozier
and went full-out. I knew it would do my bad knee in - the stress of a gravity shield that tight did bad things to wrecked joints. Not a big deal.

Flying at this speed and using the comms never ended up being smart, but I had no choice. Making sure my signal went to the Tsyfarian ship before bouncing to the
Dozier
, I opened the channel again.

“
Dozier
, this is Jonah Madison again. Where’s Hodges?”

“He’s on his way, sir,” he said. I could hear the nervousness in his voice.

“Good. Actually no, not good. He’s in his command center, lower decks, isn’t he? Patch me through there.”

“I can’t—”

“Look up my auth codes, son. You can.”

“Yes, sir. Hold on, sir.” Hodges might be trying to avoid me and work out what I was up to, but I could short circuit that with his own hierarchy.

“Madison?” Hodges voice rang in my ear. “What’s the meaning of this?”

“You know what it is, Hodges,” I said sweetly.

“That’s General Hodges, Captain, and I’ll see you stripped of that rank the second you—”

“Shut up, Hodges,” I told him, letting my voice go cold, “we both know you won’t. Now. You listen to me. I want you to imagine something.”

“Excuse me?” His confusion amused me, really.

“You. Right now in your command center. I’ve been in the room. It’s rather sterile and cold. So let’s warm it up with some mental images.”

“What are you talking about? You’re insane! Where are you, Captain Madison?”

“Imagine,” I continued, paying him no mind, “a cone. An entire fleet of ships, flying in formation. Now imagine that cone is about the diameter of the orbit of Earth. Small fighters, command-class ships, personal transport, supply, the entire fleet. Spread out and in perfect formation. A simple cone. Can you picture it, Hodges?”

“Captain Madison, what are you—”

“
Can you picture it
?” I yelled.

“Yes, yes, a big cone.”

“Good enough. Now imagine it bearing down on the
Dozier
. The whole thing. All those ships. Oh, some of the support ships could avoid it, sure. Your personal fighter squad could rally and get out of the way. But the
Dozier
itself? No way, Hodges. No way at all.”

“Are you threatening me, Madison?” His voice remained confident, but I thought I could hear the faintest crack.

“Yes. And I’m not done yet. And really, call me Jonah. It’ll make you feel better. Because that cone, even if your fighter group could blow it all to hell and back, is moving at a good enough clip that the flaming debris would still smash into you with the fury of the fist of God. Do you understand what I’m telling you, Hodges?”

“That you’re mutinous and insane?”

“That I’m coming for you. The tip of the cone, the thing that will personally hit you so hard you won’t have existed, is me. That whole fleet - all of those ships bearing down on you - I want you to picture them, the damage they can do, the raw destruction headed your way, and then I want you to realize something.”

“And what is that?” The crack in his voice started becoming more and more apparent.

“The fleet bearing down isn’t your problem. You shouldn’t even worry about them. They’re nothing. I’m the problem. I, personally, will be the one do deal with you. That entire fleet is nothing compared to what I plan to do to you with my own hands.”

“Madison—”

“Jonah.”

“Jonah! Fine, Jonah! Think about what you’re doing! This is insane! And for what? What is your problem?”

“You took my wife.”

“I don’t know what you’re—”

“You took my wife. You had her on the same ship I stood on, and you looked me in the eye and told me to go fight your war for you in order to save her. Did you think I wouldn’t work it out? Better yet, did you think when I worked it out that this would end any other way?”

“You’re deranged! You can’t turn on your own species like this! Think of all the innocents you’ll kill!”

“You. Took. Shae.” I slowed down and pulled up alongside the
Dozier
. In a GravPack, most sensors found you too small to deal with. That wasn’t as much of a problem as it was back when people used them regularly - there are ways of checking, but no one thought of it anymore. Hodges would - or someone on his team would - soon enough, but it was too late. I was on their doorstep.

“It wasn’t like that, Jonah!” he insisted. I didn’t reply for a few seconds, to let him sweat.

While he did that, I cycled the airlock and strolled in. Sure, Hodges would burn me, but that would take an hour, at least, and he’d have to hang up first. He thought I was in a ship on the way to him. While he thought that, I could still enter the
Dozier
just fine. I had rank, I had codes, and no one outside the command room even knew there was a problem with my being here.

“You’re going to have to do better than that, dead man,” I said, and switched my mic to mute. I greeted a few servicemen as I walked through the ship. I hit the access shaft and went down to Hodges’ command center.

“Hodges? Anything to say?” I asked, turning my mic back on.

“Damn it, Jonah, think about…what the hell?” His communications were lost in a screech and shatter, sonic blasts going off in his control center. I broke out into the best run I could manage with my knee threatening to give.

I shouldered the door open, still moving, and dove into a painful roll as a sonic blast
spanged!
above my head. Luckily I’d been moving the other direction, so the reverb didn’t hit me. I finished my roll and popped to my feet. Then I laughed.

Shae looked me in the eye and smirked.