Chapter 607

The Ready Room Aboard Ship

...”Ship, uh while we’re waiting, do you have any of the ice cream that the alien women seemed to like so much?” the General tentatively asked.

“What flavor, General?”

“Well, that vanilla sure looked good when I viewed the video.”

Ship briefly touched Jeff’s mind before two – much larger – servings of ice cream appeared before the men.

“Now, this is the way to start a meeting,” Whitworth said as he dug in.

By the time Arlene and Ann arrived, both young women beautifully coiffured with ponytails that arched sexily high off the back of their heads, their makeup perfect, and wearing loose, soft-appearing blouses that tended to drape over their breasts, with pants that hugged their tight little butts suggestively, and wearing low heels, the ashtray and dessert dishes were gone. The General, startling both, came to his feet.

“Ah, the ladies of the hour,” he said, which caused a slight frown to knit the teenagers’ brows.

With a quick glance at their husband, who shrugged almost imperceptibly, the two beautiful young women sat as the General assisted with their chairs. Arlene glanced at Ann, then, with a grin, spoke to the General. “No,” she said with emphasis.

Jeff, who had started to sip his coffee, hesitated, then grinned himself before taking the sip. General, you keep forgetting how sharp they are, he thought.

“I haven’t even asked yet,” Whitworth grumped. “I just need your input – both of you, well, among a few other minor things.”

The two must have mentally ordered coffee because it appeared in front of them.

“Thanks,” they told Ship in unison.

The General didn’t say anything; Jeff didn’t say anything.

Arlene finally puffed out a sigh. “Okay, I know we’re being set up, so let’s get it over with. What do we have to do?”

“We need,” the General began, but hesitated, “well, Earth needs a victory parade.”

“No. No and no! I don’t do parades ... And besides, our identities have to remain secret,” Arlene trumped his request with a smirk while Ann fought a grin.

“Oh, no one will realize who you are, and you don’t have to do anything, well – other than lead it, of course, and well ... maybe plan it,” he finished as he tried to catch their eyes. Before either could say anything, Whitworth hurriedly went on, “Look, Arlene, I know how you feel, but Earth was involved in this. Oh, everybody knows that your interceptors destroyed those Paladins – at least a lot of them – hell, there must be hours of footage still being played every friggin’ day on TV, but Earth fought too. Many, many people died. And... with most of them dying without so much as even damaging the enemy. Those people need to be recognized too. Earth needs a victory parade, and it needs to be led by your Wing, Arlene. Those interceptors represent victory to a world that almost became a slave world for the Miadax.

“Wing Commander, basically, the whole world fought those bastards, and your interceptors are a symbol of the effort and the lives that were put into that win. You and your people killed most of the Paladins, but Earth fought too. We can’t mention Ship, of course. Dammit, I want you two to plan and set up a parade that will be recorded and shown throughout history to mark the win against overwhelming odds to save Earth.”

Arlene cleared her throat uncomfortably. “Sir, you’re laying it on just a bit thick, aren’t you? We fought, but any good aviator could learn to fly an interceptor and fight just as well as we did.”

Whitworth tried to glower at her. “We all know that’s bullshit, so let’s get back to the point. Look, I want every nation to at least have an overfly of your Wing to let Earth know you’re still here and willing to protect this planet. No one has to know who you are, but Earth does have to know that you’re still around and ready to fight again. Your husband and I agree that Ship still needs to remain a secret, of course, but the whole world has seen your interceptors, either in person, or certainly on practically every TV broadcast since this thing started. Hell, as I said, turn any station on right now, and those battles will be on. The whole friggin’ world has cell phone cameras, and people used them. Gun cameras from the fighter jets – news cameras. There’s undoubtedly more footage of those battles than probably anything that has ever happened throughout history. However, I want the world to know that those interceptors are still here, still ready and waiting to protect Earth. There are already people worrying that those damn Paladins will come back. Earth needs reassurance, and a good old parade featuring the interceptors that saved them will help give them that.”

“All we have to do is lead my Wing in a victory parade?”

“All over the world, and I want it to be glamorous. I want to give those Talking Heads something to review, gloat over and rattle on about for weeks. No hurry. This is something that should happen well after the funerals and memorials are all over. Look, you know that your AIs can function together to produce some stunning aerial acrobatics that could never be approached by Earth’s craft. Something to dig the people out of their depression that will naturally follow thoughts of ‘what if they come back?’ Or ‘what if more of them come?’”

“Hell, come to think of it, maybe we can, at least, take off on the experts’ idea and leak that the Wing was led by a female from another world who, with her people, fought the Miadax throughout the galaxy – a young, beautiful female – but that’s absolutely all that we will tell them. Hmmm ... maybe a back shot from a distance of you two tucking that beautiful hair into your helmets before you and Ann start up the belly ladder of interceptor number 1. Nothing that could even remotely identify either of you, but with Ship’s flight deck in the background with rows of interceptors moving into line ready to launch behind you.”

Jeff couldn’t help it – and started chuckling.

“Okay. Okay, so that is a little out there, but dammit, something like that could be believable, and Earth needs it – her people need it. I want a parade to show Earth that she is still protected. The Talking Heads will do the rest.”

Arlene finished the last dregs of her coffee before setting her cup down with a thump. With a glance at her partner who nodded almost imperceptibly, “We agree to help, but we aren’t heroes, and we’re not going to be depicted as such. With a glance at her partner who nodded again, “And I know that Ann feels the same way. We did what we had to do, just as everyone else did. Don’t forget all those fighter pilots who died, and all those innocent people who were just trying to live their lives before the Miadax came along and killed them.

“There are air shows the world over. Somebody organizes those things. I’ll need ideas, and I want input from everyone that fought an interceptor – everyone. Plus Ship’s ideas, all my sister-wives’ ideas, and our husband’s, of course.”

“Ship,” she said as her glance changed, “if it’s possible, I want another interceptor built to replace the one we lost.”

“Affirmative, Wing Commander.”

“Arlene,” Jeff cautioned.

“They fought, too, and they almost died for Earth. They screwed up, but we all screw up. I want them to fly with us in the parade. The parade does not happen until the new interceptor is ready.”

Standing, the two pulled Jeff to his feet. “Come, Husband.”

It finally dawned on the General why Arlene and Ann had dressed so carefully, and it certainly wasn’t for the meeting.

On the Alien Ship’s Auxiliary Bridge Just After Ship Had Fired

The big ship had bucked and shuddered, throwing everyone on the Auxiliary Bridge to the deck. Just as they began to scramble to their feet, the artificial gravity picked that moment to stutter from zero to roughly two G’s and back again. Also, there was the mind-numbing cacophony of alarms practically deafening everyone. Adding to the sound was the bridge’s AI chanting a list of compartments open to vacuum and systems destroyed by the hit.

One thing that the Captain did manage to hear from the AI was, “Three escape pods have successfully launched.”

“Sir,” one of the technicians managed to yell over the ruckus, “all shields are nonfunctional. That ... beam or whatever it was, also took out the control junction of our main power grid. We are on local auxiliary. All weapons are down as well. Amazingly, we still have the auxiliary engines. We also have backup power for the warp engines, which is separate, of course.”

“Shut off those damn alarms,” the Captain screamed to the AI as he managed to grab hold of the back of his command seat. “And somebody fix that damn grav generator before it kills us all.”

“Who?” the technician asked as he struggled to hold onto a stanchion. “None of us have been trained for that section. Someone on the bridge crew would know how, but the AI there tells me that the Main Bridge is empty. They must have escaped.”

The grav generator picked that moment to go on strike. At least the gravity was no longer fluctuating. There just wasn’t any at all.

The Captain grabbed even tighter to his seat back. “Get us the hell (Interpreted) out of here before that thing fires again,” the Captain screamed to the hapless technician who happened to be closest.

“With what? We can’t outrun them on auxiliary power,” the tech answered reasonably.

With a mind-numbing shudder, the ship went to maximum warp.

“Who did that?” the Captain screamed as he frantically looked around. After a moment as things steadied, he realized that they had escaped from the other ship – if it didn’t follow them into warp, that is.

The three technicians managed to drift to something to hold onto long enough to look at him. Obviously, none were even close to a console, so it was certainly none of them. “Sir, it wasn’t us. There must be someone in Engineering.”

“Hmmm, maybe that damn Chief Engineer finally did something right.”

“But Sir,” one of the technicians said after a moment, “The board shows that one of the escape pods was the Engineering pod. Also, the AI verifies that there is no one in Engineering.”

Slowly, even the Captain began to realize just how screwed he was. “So, what’s our course,” he resignedly asked.

The three technicians managed to stare first at each other, then at their Captain. “None of us knows anything about navigation, Sir.”

Part of what a Captain had to learn to become a Captain was celestial navigation, but he had passed the course sitting in his uncle’s office when the uncle signed off on the course for him. He knew less about interstellar navigation than the technicians did, which was absolutely nothing.

A quick check with the AI brought further disappointment. Only the navigator and the First had navigation certificates and would know how to navigate a course back home, and the bridge crew had escaped in the pods.

It turned out that more than half the crew had died during the battle, many when the beam tore through to leave vast sections of the ship in vacuum. A further desperate check soon revealed that none of the remaining crew knew anything about navigation. Then one of the technicians revealed that all the star charts had been scrambled from the main bridge, probably the First Officer’s work before he and his crew had abandoned ship.

Eventually, the Captain had decided to shut the warp drive down manually until he could decide what to do. That was when they found that the Engineering section, which included the warp drive, was locked, and the old combination the Captain had didn’t work. The section was fortified against a possible mutiny, so it would take many shifts to burn through to gain access.

With an incompetent Captain that had been given his rank, leading three technicians who knew little to nothing about the actual workings of a ship’s bridge, no Paladins or their Commander, the monster tore on through warp space heading who knew where. After much contemplation, the Captain decided to have a crew cut into Engineering, not realizing that the Chief Engineer had rigged the warp coils to blow as soon as the Engineering section was breached.

Three Earth days later, Ship detected an enormous burst of energy across multiple dimensions.

The Miadax race would continue to send ships out to plunder planets, but the Raider and the idiot commanding her now existed only as a few stray atoms spread across several dimensions.

The Prison Planet

Over the weeks and with an abruptness that seemed to be the norm for 2214, the snows had turned to slush and the slush into mud – lots of mud. The nights were generally still quite cool, but the days were beginning to warm at a rapid rate.

With the big blade attached to the tractor, Morales tried to smooth and widen the path to the stream ford. The problem was the mud. If he had been able to wait a couple more weeks, he could have done a better job, but he wanted to get to the valley and the fields.

The ford was shallow in the summer and had a gravel bottom, but there were short banks which caused him to have to work out a ramp on either side to get the big tractor with the farm equipment hanging behind it across and up onto the field. The crossing problems were further exacerbated by the spring runoff from the mountains. He could have waited, but they had all watched the videos and read all they could. The bags of seed potatoes that the General provided needed to be planted.

They had even found thoroughly covered fertilizer stacked on pallets in the area where the implements were kept.

“Damn, he must have thought those aliens were going to win,” Morales remarked morosely when he first saw the bags of fertilizer. “And the Matthews haven’t returned, so ... who knows?”

Later, as Morales maneuvered the tractor and gang disk across the ford and onto the first field, “The aliens didn’t win,” Jasmine argued as she sat with her husband in the cab of the big tractor; “The Matthews will be back.”

“I hope you’re right, but one thing is for certain, I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. Oh, we’ve watched those videos, and hooking the implements to the tractor is simple. I know that I let the disk down, put the tractor in gear and drive across the field. But... I know I’m going to fuck it up. It can’t be that simple.”

“Well,” Ashley said a few minutes later as they stood in the field, “we’ve watched videos and read article after article, and there seem to be about a million ways to raise potatoes. Some gardeners dig deep holes and put the potatoes eight or ten inches into the ground. Others form a thick raised bed of dirt to put them in, while others plant them in buckets. Some just cut the eye out of the potato and plant it, while yet others plant the whole seed potato. We have plenty of seed potatoes of several different varieties. This can’t be rocket science. Something will work.”