Chapter 17

Our mission plan changed a little bit from the last time, beyond the obvious required change of a different place for us to drop out of FTL. The logistics stores carried by the Silver Javelin would include a pack of ARMs, just in case we needed them, and six “gift boxes” that might entice the Sa’arm to pay a visit to our friendly minefield.

Two of those gift boxes would hold the fake officer’s pistol that the crew had dreamed up, and the containers they were in were a little larger than the others in hopes the Sa’arm got to them first. Our hopes were that the Sa’arm would first be rewarded for their curiosity and that would encourage them to scoop up all the rest as they hunted for any additional treasures that might await them.

The horrific pistol absurdity was a brilliant demonstration of a bunch of Earth’s worst historical engineering and design malpractices. At the top was a six-chamber revolving drum. The grip was a set of what looked like brass knuckles and contained the trigger. At the bottom was a ten centimeter long fixed blade. Everything was made of low-grade steel, and it weighed a lot. You could shoot it, punch someone with it, or stab someone with it. It also could serve as a useful piece of physical exercise equipment. It was the ultimate example of do everything, but nothing well at all.

The ammunition was a rimless, brass-encased black powder charge that held an iron projectile. The projectile was hexagonal, but the casing was cylindrical. There was no barrel, and the cartridges fired from the cylinder with nothing to help provide any accuracy or improve projectile velocity. Only about ten percent of the powder would burn before the projectile exited the chamber, the rest doing nothing more than creating a huge blinding flash and a dense cloud of white smoke. And it kicked like a mule.

The trigger was disaster perfected. It was double-action-only with a gritty twelve-pound pull. It was stiff at the beginning of travel, then lightened up as the chamber finished rotating, and then hardened right back up before releasing the exposed hammer, which conveniently had a very sharp end on it. The trigger on my beloved Kimber 1911 had a wonderfully smooth, consistent, short and light pull that never interfered with maintaining proper sight alignment when I had enjoyed shooting it so much. This trigger was the opposite of that perfection in every possible way.

Sights were installed on the side, so you held it “gangsta style” and the rear and front sights were so close together to make them practically useless. Since the maximum effective range of the subsonic ammunition might possibly reach all the way out to ten meters, sights probably weren’t required. We hoped they’d recognize them for what they were and use them, as that orientation would make the knife attached to the bottom a hazard preventing a dickhead from using a second hand to support their grip. If you didn’t use the sights you could orient the pistol any way you wanted.

Reloading this was an exercise in total frustration and exotic risks. Accessing the rear of the chamber required very fine motor skills to depress a tiny latch that would let the nearly too-small door slide away to allow reloading. Removing spent cases involved tapping the weapon on a hard surface to dislodge the casings, as there was nothing to grip them with. When you individually reloaded the strange cartridges into the six chambers, you had to fiddle with them to make the bullet properly align with the hexagonal part of the chamber or the round wouldn’t fit, demanding yet more challenging fine motor skills.

The reloading process required two important safety practices. One, when you were trying to dislodge spent casings, you were inevitably banging the weapon on a rock or something with live rounds in some or all of the other chambers, seriously risking a negligent discharge. You were unable to access all of the chambers at the same time, so you reloaded in a painstaking, round-by-round adventure in mortal hazard. Two, because of the unique design, it was highly likely the weapon would be pointed at the user during this process, so if it happened to accidentally fire it most likely would kill or injure the user.

It had been designed with the ergonomic needs of the Sa’arm in mind, so we abused those as much as we thought we could get away with. It would be impossible for them to reload the pistol with anything other than the smaller, more dexterous hand they had in front, and that was the only hand which could physically fit inside the pistol’s frame because of the “brass knuckles” feature of the grip. They would have to switch hands several times during the reloading process. When they did fight through a reload, banging the thing around like a hammer, and switching hands, the sharp knife sticking out of the bottom would be a dangerous impediment.

In human hands this pistol was a heavy, barely controllable disaster, and perhaps as much of a danger to the user as it might be to anyone it was fired at. We only test fired the prototype once before feeding it to a recycler, as no one wanted to take the risk of performing a reload involving live rounds.

We seriously doubted a Sa’arm would would improve its survival odds by pointing this at you instead of trying to hack at you with one of their force blades.

It would certainly have improved its bling quotient, however. Staff Sergeant White turned this into a work of alien art. It had clean lines and gentle curves that would have looked right at home as a prop in a big Hollywood movie. The green and black color job made it look sinister and exotic, and the platinum embossing in front made it seem that if this was pointed at you, the alien language being presented was communicating a sinister final message.

I don’t know what the Sa’arm might think of this all this pseudo-alien beauty, but there was no doubt a rear echelon non-combatant would take one look at it and instantly make an uncomfortable mess in their uniform.

This would be better than us having a gold mine.

I presented a copy to Colonel Decker in appreciation for his help on the project, and for laughs I had the AI fabricate a little Sa’arm blood that we strategically dripped on it. He was overjoyed and laughed uproariously as I gave it to him.

“Don’t worry sir, it’s not loaded. It’s too dangerous to have any ammunition for it, so the only ammo goes in the gift boxes.”

“I’m going to mount this on my wall here. It’s going to be fun seeing people’s reaction to it.”

“Of course you’re not going to tell anyone where you got it from, right?”

“Quite right. The provenance of this unique artifact is strictly classified. In Intel we can get away with that explanation.”

<Noted.> The AI chimed in.

Word would spread like wildfire throughout the base once this got on Colonel Decker’s wall, and with the initial appearance of the “Sa’arm Officer’s Pistol” being in the office of the head spook on base, nobody was going to doubt it at all. No further marketing would ever be needed to make this the most-desired item on the planet. To top it off, the AI would now refuse to talk about it. Colonel Decker probably hadn’t meant to do that, but he didn’t seem very interested in clarifying that.

Hopefully the Sa’arm would value this just as highly.

“1MC.” Beep. “All stations, prepare to drop from FTL. Set condition Zebra throughout the ship.”

“Ship is at condition Zebra, captain” the XO reported.

“All stations, FTL drop in five. Four. Three. Two. One. FTL disengaged.”

“Engineering, conn. FTL shutdown, main engine start.”

Ensign Porter went through his checklist and the main engines came back online.

“All stations report.”

“Conn, engineering, all systems GO, green across the board.”

“Conn, sensors. No contacts, no hazards.”

At least this time there wasn’t a welcoming committee waiting for us. The Silver Javelin would arrive in five minutes instead of being right behind us, one of the changes we had made to our plan. Not that it would give them any better warning if something was waiting for us, but there was a small chance we might be able to draw any Sa’arm ships away from the drop point during those five minutes and thus give the Stagecoach a better chance to escape. It was the only thing we could think of.

“All stations, secure from FTL drop. Set Condition Yoke.” Beep beep.

“All stations report condition Yoke, captain” the XO informed me.

We looked around for enemy ships during the wait and saw nothing. We were quite a bit farther out from Tantalus than before, so we’d have to burn a bit longer to get to where our rendezvous point would be. The Silver Javelin dropped out of FTL on time and together we headed towards the system.

“Conn, Sensors. Weak contact bearing 012 down 6, range unknown. Probable Sa’arm ship, identifying as Sierra One.”

“Copy, Sensors.” I expected we would start seeing some enemy ships on our approach. Since we only had a weak intercept on one and they never operated alone, I figured we had picked this one up at extreme range and they weren’t an immediate threat. We drifted for another ten minutes until we got to RP-1 and halted there. Sensors had picked up a second contact near the first, but it was fading in and out of detection.

We had the ordnance bot unload the ARMs that we had jumped in with to make sure we had something we could fight with if needed. Then they replaced them with three racks of mines before we headed towards Tantalus.

We finally picked up the third expected contact and had started to narrow down the range estimate on the group when Sensors had a tentative identification as Sa’arm destroyers. We would give them a wide berth and try to sneak down towards our intended orbit without them seeing us. The destroyers didn’t move. We didn’t pick up any other contacts, and only picked up intermittent search radars on the planet as we dropped our first load of mines. The distribution pattern looked good and was in a stable orbit, and we gently nudged the ship up and away as we transmitted the weak IFF signal to keep the mines in safe mode until we were clear.

Some more ships dropped out of FTL as we were leaving orbit, but they were far away and nowhere near RP-1 so they didn’t complicate our first return trip. The Silver Javelin reloaded our mission bay and we headed back to Tantalus for another drop. As we approached the planet we saw that the new arrivals were going to land on the planet and used our previous trick of following them expecting that they would have the same sensor blind spot in their baffles that Confederacy vessels suffered from. We dropped that load without incident and headed back.

There were a couple of times when it got a little dicey over the next few days, but for the most part things went pretty smoothly. Once a bunch of ships left the planet and hung around in a lower orbit than what we had been using when seeding mines. I decided to wait the four hours it took them to do whatever they were doing before they left orbit and headed out, presumably to FTL off somewhere. As we spent a lot of time at battle stations during these trips I gave the crew some needed downtime.

The second time the pack of destroyers decided to relocate and went right into a spot along where we planned to travel when exiting orbit. I decided to just sit in orbit and wait to see what they would do. After an hour it seemed they weren’t going anywhere, so we plotted a different route back to the Silver Javelin and weren’t detected.

After three days, I gave everyone twelve hours of downtime and we sat next to the Silver Javelin to take a break. I was exhausted and started worrying whether I might make a mistake if I kept up this pace. I’m sure everyone else was the same way, so we all got six hours of sleep and some time to unwind before we got back to it.

By sheer luck we found a debris field of what had most likely been the Golden Arrow, suggesting that the AI had self-destructed the ship. If the Sa’arm had prevented that, the wreckage would have been in bigger pieces as they wouldn’t want to utterly destroy it. Or there would be no wreckage at all, as they could have captured the entire ship. With small bits and pieces floating in a very large field, it looked a lot like a self-destruct. That was the best of the bad outcomes.

Four days later we delivered the last of our mines, and then went back to drop the gift boxes. Since these weren’t stealthy at all, they were the last things we placed in orbit, and we had them wait an hour before they started serenading the Sa’arm with Afternoon Delight.

As soon as they went active the Sa’arm woke up. Yup, they were interested in the VHF and UHF bands that these were variously broadcasting on, that’s for sure. We were barely out of orbit when six Sa’arm patrol craft leapt off the planet’s surface to investigate. We tracked their progress so we could get an idea of which stupid prizes they would go for before they gave up, and the first was Trojan Five, one of the bombs. A Lactanus sidled up to the package and a moment later we got a weak indication that something had gone wrong on board. It stayed stationary for a long time, probably trying to deal with whatever problems had developed.

A Vacuna scout ship went up to Trojan Two, which had one of the pistols. It stayed close to it for a long time before returning to the surface. We couldn’t tell what had happened, but it looked like they had grabbed it.

Another Vacuna went to look at Trojan Three. It also remained alongside it for a while before anything happened, and that time we could definitely tell that something very wrong had happened on the ship. It started rolling and corkscrewing around looking as if some compressed gas storage had sprung a leak. Another Lactanus sped over to try to assist, but before it got there a number of explosions detonated on the hull, so it probably had run into the mines. That ship lost control and started drifting towards the planet.

Everything else froze in place while we drifted away towards RP-1 and the Silver Javelin. The plan had been for them to stick around in case we needed to load the ARMs, but it didn’t look like we’d have to use them. I was going to load them anyways and give those destroyers a parting gift in honor of Chris. The reload went quickly, and we started our revenge hunt. I ordered the Silver Javelin to boost out to where we had initially jumped in, and even if they were detected they had such a speed advantage on Sa’arm ships there was no way the Sa’arm would be able to intercept.

The destroyers didn’t pay any attention to the Silver Javelin, but had moved into a high orbit to protect the planet and spread out quite a bit. They wouldn’t have had any idea what was going on, but pulling into a defensive posture until they could figure it out wasn’t a dumb idea. We would fire individual shots at each target, hoping for an engine hit that might just cause them to do an uncontrolled re-entry into the atmosphere.

With the assistance of the AI, Todd plotted out the shots and fired the three missiles about twenty seconds apart. It took more than an hour for them to impact as we shot from quite far out, and we weren’t able to estimate what the damage was, nor did we see any change in their behavior. We were too far away to see much, unless something catastrophic happened or they fired up their main engines for a burn. It was like they had missed, but we’d never seen a miss with these before.

With our mission bay now empty of toys to play with, we gently boosted out to the alternate FTL exit point and jumped away.

The families were really happy when we returned. Now that we’d actually had casualties it really made it a cause for celebration when we all returned safe and sound after a mission, so of course we headed to the Sheep Pen. Colonel Decker knew we’d be there and joined us.

We all shared our stories about the mission, but we’d have to go over the more mundane details with the Colonel during the following day’s debrief, so we weren’t killing two birds with one stone today. Of course the guys made sure to share anything fun and amusing, and never mentioned at all the close calls we had.

After Todd told his story about our parting gift of the ARMs and the motivation behind it, both Tammy and Grace came up to me and gave me probably the most intense kisses they had ever planted on me before, which drew some hoots and hollers. I was pretty nervous and glanced at Susan, but she hadn’t reacted badly to them. Still, she wasn’t clapping and cheering like many of the others. I couldn’t read her on this and looked forward to having the topic changed.

“Well, that war trophy has certainly turned into a big topic of discussion around here, Carl,” Colonel Decker said as he sidled up to me. “The day after it went on my wall I think I had to say the word “classified” more times in a day than I ever have before. The Marines on base are getting pestered about the pistols nonstop. I had a Marine Colonel request a meeting with me to get a briefing on what these were and whether they’d be a problem. I explained the design to him and he laughed like hell. He said they sounded like the dumbest things in the universe and if the Sa’arm wanted them, he’d be willing to supply them with as many as they wished.”

I shook my head. “Sir, I hope this doesn’t become a problem for you.”

“I haven’t had a good laugh like these are giving me in a long time. Let’s have some fun for once. The war is serious enough.”

“That it is, sir.”

We got back to our quarters pretty late and had to go straight to bedtime with the boys. Tonight’s reading selection was a crazy story about cows who get together and go on strike, communicating their demands to the farmer using an old manual typewriter. I was in tears I was laughing so much, and the boys might have gotten as much enjoyment out of my reactions as from the story itself.

These kids had never seen a manual typewriter, and they’d probably never see a cow in their lives. Their childhoods were going to be so different than mine was, and I was a little sad later on when I thought about all the great things they’d miss.

There wasn’t any discussion about my arrangements with the ladies, and I was glad for that. Susan acted completely normal, and the two of us went to bed where she welcomed me home in her own special way. I didn’t get the impression she was at all mad at me.

Todd and I briefed Colonel Decker the next morning about our mission and he was very interested in our impressions of how the minefield worked, and what the ARMs might have done to those destroyers.

I started out. “It was kind of hard to be sure, but the mines appear to work pretty well. That Lactanus was definitely out of commission, and I think it had maybe eight mines attack it. That’s not a big ship, so if we were going to interdict anything larger we’d have to make the field denser so we could get enough impacts on target to do some real damage. If the ship were a hive sphere, I doubt any density of mines would be enough to disable it. They don’t pack enough punch for that, but against small ships they seem to work, at least when they aren’t using a shield.”