War Dog Read online

  I wasn’t expecting trouble, but you could never tell. I still had no idea how the Admiral was going to react to his little girl being cloned. I’m sure he was going to blame me even though she was the one who got me cloned.

  Once the base’s landing bay had re-pressurized, the Admiral’s shuttle extended a ramp and the two officers disembarked. Lori and I both saluted. The Admiral returned our salutes. I saw his eye flash over the five silver stars on my shoulder.

  The grimace on his face made me rethink the wisdom of wearing my new uniform… but in the end, I realized that I was no longer a Federation officer – if given my status as a clone – I had never been one to begin with. It would be better to begin my relationship with the Admiral honestly. At least as honestly as was practical.

  “This way, Admiral, Major, if you please.”

  I directed them to the only conference room on the small base. Mitty had previously swept it for recording devices or bugs. It was clean.

  I motioned for the two officers to sit down. It looked like the Admiral was going to say something. Lori looked at him, smiled and nodded to the chair. Her father relented and sat. The major followed a moment later.

  Lori and I followed suit. I took out the holo-emitter and placed it on the conference table.

  “First things first,” I said. “I think proper introductions are necessary. I’m Jeremy David Riker but you and I, Sir, have never met face-to-face. The original Commodore Riker was kidnapped, cloned and released with no memories of the event by an alien race representing a coalition of sentient beings called the Galactic Order. I am here on their behalf.”

  Admiral Spratt snorted. “You’re a clone?”

  “Yes, Sir, I am.”

  “And I’m just supposed to believe this? Are you a clone too?” the Admiral asked Lori.

  “I’m so sorry, Dad… I don’t even know if it’s fair to call you that, but yes I’m a clone too.”

  The Admiral stood up angrily.

  “I don’t know what type of sick game you two are playing or how you talked her into it JD, but the games stop now. This has passed way beyond the realm of funny or a joke.”

  I tapped the little silver box.

  Mitty appeared standing beside the table. Human tech could easily produce holograms but with nothing even close to approaching the fidelity of what they were seeing with the Archon.

  Major Morrison stood and drew his sidearm. I ignored it. Shooting Mitty would accomplish nothing and, unless he shot Lori or I in the face, our enhanced Galactic Order uniforms would harden on the impact of a bullet protecting us.

  Mitty started to speak. His deep voice was impressive. I had gotten so used to it, it wasn’t startling any more. I almost laughed when I saw both the Admiral and the Major do a double-take.

  “I am an artificial intelligence based on the memory engrams of a deceased member of a race known as the Archons. My organic body was murdered as part of an attempt to inflict global genocide by an unknown force attacking planets in our collective. We came to your solar system because we believe you are uniquely suited to help us in preventing additional acts of genocide.”

  It took a few minutes but eventually the Admiral and Major calmed down and began to listen intently to the story behind the Galactic Order’s journey to find a race to aid them in their battle.

  It helped that Lori suggested her pseudo-father check the transmission logs from the Ceres boneyard. A Commodore Riker had sent a validated status update less than a week ago. The best available human technology could not have gotten me to Earth in anything short of forty-five to fifty days.

  Over the course of the next several hours Mitty, Lori and I laid out what had happened. Explained the damage to the Gilboa and the strange species-specific role casting that was apparently the norm in the rest of the galaxy.

  Mitty explained why our meeting had to remain secret and our specific request for military assistance in the form of combat Marines.

  The Admiral listened intently and then said he had heard enough. He would authorize a clandestine operation to assist us so long as two conditions were met. The first was that he could see the Gilboa first hand. We had expected this request and were prepared to accommodate the Admiral.

  The second request was the one I had been waiting for all day. Lori’s father demanded access to FTL technologies. I thought Mitty was going to blow a circuit breaker or something. The thing was I fully supported the Admiral’s request. The Galactic Order had come into our system… after they had been attacked by an unknown force. One that had the ability to almost destroy one of the newest and most powerful of the Galactic Order’s battleships.

  For all the Admiral knew… that very same adversary was following a trail left by the damaged starship straight towards Earth. What chance would humanity have if such an enemy were to enter our system and use a similar bioweapon?

  Access to FTL technologies would at least give humanity the ability to escape and preserve the species. Was that really too high a price to pay… given that we were helping the Galactic Order and that they were the ones to have visited this threat upon us?

  In the end, I explained to Mitty once again that we could either deal with the ramifications of violating Galactic Order directives… or deal with the ramifications of no Galactic Order. The choice was his.

  ***

  “Wow… look how big she is!”

  This must have been the sixteenth time I had heard either the Major or the Admiral – or both at once – say the same thing… and we weren’t even on board the ship yet. I couldn’t wait until they got to see the tech inside the Gilboa… as well as an actually living Archon and of course our J’ni engineers.

  The Admiral had put in a class-one secure conversation with the Earth Union President and Joint Chiefs of staff. Earth would begin a crash development program to prepare itself for a possible invasion. No one was fooling themselves into thinking we could adequately defend ourselves should the enemy invade our solar system… what we could do was get all of our eggs out of the one basket.

  Lori had given her holographic projector to her father and before we left the solar system, I would make sure Earth had several of the Da’Tellen teaching machines.

  I think the most interesting thing was that the Admiral had issued recall orders for the real Commodore Riker and his daughter. Apparently, he was going to follow the Archon’s example and put the two of them in leadership positions for what would come to be known as Operation Diaspora.

  ***

  Major Morrison wasted no time in rounding up two heavy platoons of Federation Space Marines. In the end, there were ninety-eight of the fighters and twenty-seven civilian specialists that joined the crew. These numbers included sixteen spouses that were trained in advanced sciences, engineering or medicine.

  The Admiral and I had had a prolonged discussion about the inclusion of family members. In the end we agreed that it might not be in the best interest of the mission, but it was in the best interest of humanity. The one-hundred and forty or so humans onboard the Gilboa did not represent a great deal of biodiversity but it would likely be enough… especially given the advanced medical equipment available to us… to start a new human colony should the worst happen to Earth’s solar system.

  The Admiral gave me a packet of orders that I was to share once we were underway. I knew the bulk of what the packet contained. The two platoons of Marines as well as the civilian staff were being assigned to joint operations with the Galactic Order and placed under my direct command.

  Second, Major Morrison was being promoted to Lieutenant Colonel. The Admiral’s orders were that the newly promoted Colonel was to operate from the rear and field-promote officers as needed to prosecute the war from the front lines.

  I hadn’t known Morrison for long, but I expected that last order would be routinely ignored. In many ways, Morrison was just like me. I didn’t know it then, but we would become life-long friends and I would be with him as he continued to rise through the ra
nks to the very top echelon of the Galactic Marines.

  Having over two-hundred souls onboard a starship like the Gilboa was like having a single drop in a very large bucket… still it was a welcome change to hear the sounds of laughter and camaraderie echoing through the alien corridors. After spending so much time in the relative isolation of Ceres and the boneyard, it felt good to have people around again.

  The logistics of handling the movement of supplies, work requests and a thousand other little details threatened to overwhelm me. I had felt like Moses when all the Israelites kept coming to him to adjudicate every little squabble they had. His father-in-law Jethro spoke to Moses and counseled him to appoint others to help.

  I didn’t have Jethro and I didn’t have a host of people to help me with the administrative tasks of running a ship like the Gilboa. What I did have were a pair of Archons… some of the best administrators in the known galaxy. Shella had quickly taken charge and the result was nothing short of phenomenal. I hadn’t realized how much faster things could progress with the right people plugged into the right tasks.

  This had become a bit of a reoccurring theme. The J’ni were better engineers than my people. But Whiskers was a better man to lead the engineering staff. What made the human contingent so unique was not our ability to be superior at any given task but rather our ability to work across disciplines. We provided something the original crew of the Gilboa, and I suspected the Galactic Order in general, lacked. We provided a means for developing interdisciplinary synergies.

  A guy named Saul of Tarsus wrote a famous letter some 2200 hundred years ago with advice to a struggling church in a place called Corinth that spoke of this very thing. I suspected it might be considered one of the oldest leadership guides still in existence. He said something along the lines of ‘There is one body, but it has many parts. But all its many parts make up one body.’

  Even back then, humanity recognized the whole was greater than the sum of the parts. It made me wonder how the Galactic Order had managed to form in the first place given the lack of some unifying force. I was going to have to ask Mitty about it sometime. My musings were soon interrupted, however.

  As I was walking towards the main bridge (it turns out there were three… did I mention the J’ni like to over-engineer), I heard the sound of running behind me. I turned and saw something I had never in my life ever expected to see. Whiskers was jogging down the curved corridor towards me. In a few short weeks, this ninety-eight-year-old man had gone from looking like he was in his mid-seventies to a man who might be in his early sixties.

  The advanced alien rejuv tech Lori had been administering to our original somewhat geriatric crew was turning out to be a minor miracle in its own right. Mitty had said that the treatments, while effective, would be limited in their efficacy because the recipients where starting their treatments at such an advanced age. Based on what I was seeing, I don’t think Whiskers was about to complain.

  “Admiral!” Whiskers huffed as he finally reached me. “I’m glad I caught you. I’ve got some ideas I want to run by you.”

  “You could have used the comms. I can’t have my chief engineer dying of a heart attack on me.”

  Whiskers snorted. “I’ll have you know I’ve been jogging a 2K every morning for a week… Sir”

  I smiled. I knew he had. I also knew the gravity plating had been set to 75% in the newly constructed gym. I knew because the Marines who, with the help of the J’ni, had built the facility in one of the many empty hanger decks, complained just this morning that somebody kept resetting the grav-plating on them. They liked to keep it at 200%.

  “What’s up old timer,” I said as I patted him on the back. “Let’s talk about it over a cup of coffee.”

  Chapter 9: Dirty Dog…

  “The J’ni are great engineers… but they aren’t innovators. You tell’m what to build and they build it. But you ask them to enhance a system and they look at ya like yer a cat in the hen house,” Whiskers said.

  “Can I assume you have some enhancements in mind,” I asked while experimentally sipping the excellent, if somewhat excessively hot, synthetic brew.

  “Ay, that I do. The main plasma conduits are leaky as a bad shower head. The J’ni keep six times as much insultation around them as they need just to protect against the radiation leakage. Every peta-watt that is absorbed by the insulation is a peta-watt that can’t go to the shields or weapons systems.”

  I added a little cream to the cup I was sipping… I hadn’t been able to adjust the temperature to that perfect point I wanted. My wife, Lori, was a master of the art, but a grown man needed to learn to pour his own coffee, and so I soldiered on. At a certain point I had more of a latte then a plain boring coffee but, at least, I could drink it without scalding my throat.

  “So, it seems to me the fix would be to enhance the efficiency of the plasma conduits. If I remember the ship’s schematics correctly, they’re lined with some type of superconducting beryllium alloy. I would imagine a better high-temperature superconductor would do the trick,” I said.

  Whiskers snorted. “There ya go again… trying to teach yer grandma how to suck eggs.”

  “Come on Old-Timer… even a blind hog finds an acorn once and a while,” I laughed. “What’s it going to take to make this happen and what can we expect as a result?”

  “We don’t need to do all of them at once. If I can shut the primaries down for a day, the boys and I can get them taken care of. I’ll get another team working on the shield emitters and weapons. They’re not designed for the bigger load we’ll be delivering, but I’ve looked them all over pretty thoroughly. I’ve got some tricks up my sleeve that should get’m to handle the extra juice just fine.”

  Whiskers took a gulp of his coffee. It was every bit as hot as mine, but decades of swigging homemade rot-gut had deadened the nerves in his throat.

  “I noticed you didn’t say anything about what we could expect as a return on our time investment.”

  Whiskers nodded.

  “The shields are pretty easy to estimate. All we do with them is bring more emitters online at once. The J’ni only bring a third of them up at a time so if one gets damaged they can bring up a redundant emitter. We’ll have the option of running them that way or firming up the shields by bringing more online. I imagine we’d be looking at… at least a thirty to forty present increase in shielding.

  “The weapons systems are another matter. The plasma guns may not ramp up as nicely. We really won’t know until we test them. The railguns on the other hand should be able to impart another thirty to forty percent in terms of kinetic energy. The downside to the kinetics is they take ejection mass. Once we shoot all of our KEWs… that’s it they’re done. What I’d like to do is make our KEW rounds about a third smaller… their punch would be the same, but we’d have thirty to forty percent more ammunition.”

  “It sounds reasonable. I’m guessing it will take a little while to refabricate the KEW ammunition. How long for the plasma turrets?”

  Whiskers rubbed his chin. “I’d like ta tell ya a day but I’m probably safer saying two. We may be better off mounting additional turrets rather than putting all our time and energy into trying to reengineer the existing guns… at least until we have more experience with them.”

  I nodded. “Make it so Chief Engineer. You just bought yourself three more days on the schedule. Use them well.”

  “Aye Aye Captain”

  ***

  It turned out that nothing is ever as easy as it should be, and the engineering team needed four extra days to get everything up and running. The Gilboa was still only at about eighty percent but all the major power, life support and weapons systems were operating at peek (or in some case beyond peek) efficiency.

  I decided that it was time to take our leave of the Sol system and to boldly go where no man has gone before. Sadly, fate had other plans.

  I was on the bridge. Whiskers was at the engineering station. Colonel Morrison was acting as
my First Officer when he wasn’t overseeing his Marines. Mitty was at the sensors and I had Shella running the comms. I had stolen both Daniels and Heinz from the engineering team. They were now my navigators.

  I took my seat in the center of the bridge. Sadly, there still wasn’t a popcorn machine but I was feeling a lot like a fictional starship captain. I decided you only live once so I decided to indulge my inner-child.

  “Ahead warp factor three Number One!”

  “Sir,” Morrison asked in a confused – what the heck is he doing now – voice.

  “Sorry, I just always wanted to say that,” I admitted.

  Sandy and John had both swiveled their chairs to look at me. Sandy had a similar look of confusion on her face. John on the other hand was smiling from ear to ear.

  “Mi ween baren engines… thay canna take the strain sir!”

  “As you were… Mister Scot,” I laughed.

  “Navigator,” I said with a firmer voice. “Bring the navigational deflectors up and make best possible speed for the Oort cloud. The sooner we can get out of the sun’s gravity well the sooner we can engage the skip-drive.”

  “Course plotted and laid in, Sir” Sandy replied crisply.

  “Mister Daniels, if you would be so kind… throttle up the VASIMR drives. Adjust the gravity-plating and inertial dampeners to compensate for a sixteen g acceleration. When Commander McGraw gives you the ‘all clear’ push the engines to the edge. If they’re going to fail, I’d prefer to know it now and not a month from now.”

  The ‘timbre’ of the Gilboa changed subtlety. I wasn’t sure, but it felt wrong. I waited for Whiskers to say something from the Engineering station, but he was intent on watching his board. I decided I was imagining things. In hindsight, I wish I had gone with my gut on this one.

  “Shields firming up at sixty-three percent of capacity per the flight plan,” Sandy announced.

  “VASIMRs are throttling up fifty percent capacity,” John reported. “Acceleration ramping up along expected curves. Currently at three gravities and climbing… There are some minor variations within the forward manifold but still operating within expected norms. Twelve gravities… fourteen gravities…”