Chapter 3

Bert Murray looked at the copy of the message he'd been handed as he entered the room and frowned, "Does anyone have any idea what this base has been doing?"

He'd only had a moment to peruse the contents and that was the first thing he'd thought of. Around him people seemed to be dazed as they stood around the Captain's ready room waiting for the meeting to begin. He wasn't particularly surprised when no one responded immediately to his question. There were so many things going on throughout the galaxy that he didn't have hope of keeping track of all of them.

The fact that these REMFs didn't have a clue either wasn't really that surprising. Base GHU-069 was on someone's secret list and could have been doing anything. Personally he didn't even know what the acronym GHU stood for though some of his colleagues reckoned it stood for God Help Us.

"No, Commander, we don't," said the Captain from behind him. "It is the same with these orders, we weren't expecting them and the whole thing has come as something of a surprise."

Bert felt his cheeks turn pink as the Captain spoke, "I'm sorry, Ma'am, I meant no disrespect."

"And none was taken, Commander," replied the Captain as she moved around him and headed for the conference table in the centre of the room. "Now if everyone could find a seat we can discuss what we are going to do and see what preparations we need to make."

The ship's officers took seats on either side of the rectangular table, Jon Wells took a moment to point towards the end of the table away from the Captain, "Grab that seat, Commander," he instructed.

Bert nodded and moved around to the designated seat, he didn't rush, taking the time to look at those sat around the table. The Captain and First Officer he'd already met and whilst he hadn't really rated them, he didn't have anything against them either. His perusal of the ship's manning list earlier enabled him to identify the others at the table.

Terry Webb was the ship's engineer and sitting next to her was Julie Simpson, the deck officer. Opposite that pair was Gerry Stevens, the ship's systems officer. The five people present made up the command staff of the ship and were the only volunteers on the crew. All of the other people on the vessel, those who did the actual work were the concubines of these people.

Bert knew it hadn't always been this way. When the Fleet Auxiliary had been formed the deckhands and the like had been volunteers as well but it was felt that training them as officers or transferring them to the Navy as crewmen was a better use of manpower. Using the concubines for the simple tasks around the ship allowed the crew's families to stay together and freed up volunteers for more important tasks.

"Ladies and Gentlemen," began Alice and then paused until she had everyone's attention. "You've all seen our new orders and now we need to decide what we are going to do about it. The 'Eddie' is heading towards the Morgat system and will be arriving in two and a half days time. When we get there we need to be ready to extract the people who are there and accommodate them. We also need, if necessary to destroy the base." She glanced around the table, "I'm open to suggestions as to what we need to do to accomplish those tasks."

She sat back and waited to see what ideas would be forthcoming.

Julie Simpson was the first to speak, "Both of our interface craft are serviceable and we have pilots for both. Lifting the people there shouldn't be too much of a problem." She glanced around the table and when no one said anything she continued, "We can put people up in the central areas for now but I'm sure we could put some of the empty pods into service if we need to."

"How many people are there on the base?" asked Jon Wells.

"According to the data dump that came with the orders there are ten plus their concubines. I wish they'd given us the total but we'll assume there are about thirty-five or so," replied the Captain.

"We can get that many in one trip," said Julie, "and there's more than enough room in the ship's core to accommodate them once they're here."

Alice nodded and looked towards her First Officer, "What do you think, Jon?"

"That's fine provided the Sa'arm aren't anywhere near the base when we get there," he said. "If they are then we could have a whole host of problems. We have no weapons either here or on the interface craft and on top of all that the thing handles like a barge in the atmosphere."

"That's true," admitted Julie.

"Do we have any drones on board?" asked Gerry Stevens. "If we do we could simply drop a transporter terminus down to them and bring them up that way."

"We've got the drones but I don't think the terminus will be big enough to recover the AI, for that we're going to need to land," said Alice. "If we can't get down to them then we'll have to do that to get the people out which brings us nicely on to the second problem. How do we destroy the base?"

"We could throw pods at it like that Civil Service guy did on Neptune," offered Terry Webb.

Alice cocked her head to one side and looked puzzled.

When no one else offered to enlighten her, Bert spoke up, "Tribune ap Rhys was in charge of a ship similar to this one and was evacuating concubines from the colony world of Neptune during a Sa'arm invasion. In a bid to assist the defenders he tossed eleven habitat pods at the grounded hive ship. It worked and the hive ship was destroyed, which allowed sufficient time for us to mount a counter attack."

"Uhmm," hummed Alice her eyes looking off into the distance. "Just how effective was that" she asked. "Did it totally destroy the ship, or just disable it?"

"It was the same as dropping a small megaton yield bomb on the thing," replied the ship's engineer, "without the fallout."

"It would have been even more effective if he'd been able to fill the pods," added Bert.

"What with?" asked Alice.

"Just about anything," said Bert, "It was a kinetic strike so the greater the mass involved the bigger the bang."

"Velocity would have helped as well," added Gerry.

"And that could have been achieved?" asked Alice.

"Not in that scenario," said Gerry. "It was pretty much a snap shot, but if he'd had time he could have accelerated the pods for a few hours before releasing them."

Alice's look said why didn't he, so Bert supplied the answer. "From the moment ap Rhys decided to throw the pods to the first one being detached from the ship was fifteen minutes, tops." He nodded towards the ship's engineer, "He's right though, if the pods could have been made more aerodynamic the terminal velocity would have been higher and the yield greater."

Alice thought for a couple of minutes and everyone sat and waited.

"So if we reconfigure the pods we're carrying and fill them with whatever we have available we should be able to destroy the base from orbit?" she asked eventually.

"Yes, ma'am," responded Gerry.

Jon Wells raised his hand from the table and Alice nodded for him to continue.

"Some of the pods we're carrying are filled with that refined uranium ore," he said. "Would it be better to reconfigure some of those pods as bombs rather than trying to fill the empty ones?"

"Would it make a nuclear bomb?"

Gerry shook his head negatively, "I very much doubt it," he said. "It'll be more like the depleted uranium rounds that tanks used to use."