The Synchronicity War Part 3 Page 3

  "Recon drones have been launched, CAG," said Valkyrie.

  "Acknowledged," said Shiloh as he watched the drone icons move away from the Task Force on the display. One of the drones was veering off to one side as it headed for the moon. When it left Earth's shadow, it would keep its orientation such that no reflected sunlight bounced back to the moon or the Earth, just in case there were enemy detection devices there.

  "Any transmissions of any kind?" asked Shiloh even though he already knew the answer. If there had been either the Com technician or Valkyrie would have told him already.

  "None so far, CAG. I'm not detecting any sources of light or heat from Earth either, although at this distance our equipment isn't sensitive enough to detect the light and heat from something like a campfire. Naturally cloud cover would block just about anything smaller than a whole city on fire."

  Shiloh nodded, aware that Valkyrie was watching the entire Bridge through several video cameras. "How long before our recon drone is close enough to detect sources that small?"

  "Hard to be precise, but I'd give it another 18 minutes or so before we have any chance of detection, CAG."

  "And how long before we can expect data from the moon drone?"

  "Four to five minutes. We should be able to tell what the state of the lunar bases are by then, CAG."

  "Very good, Commander. In the meantime, I'll take care of some personal business." Shiloh got up from the Command Station chair and headed for the exit that led to the room where he could eliminate some bodily wastes. Valkyrie and the other A.I.s knew what the phrase 'take care of some personal business’ meant. Even after all this time, they were still amused and fascinated by the human need to excrete liquid and solid waste. He'd lost count of how many times he’d had to change the subject to avoid a conversation getting into the gritty details of the whole process. As he left the Bridge, he consciously had to resist the urge to declare that someone else 'had the Con'. Those words belonged to the days when he was a ship CO. and that was no longer the case. He was now the Task Force Commander. This was entirely superfluous since his permanent rank of Chief of Space Operations granted him command of the Task Force automatically. He wanted to engrain the principle into the crew and the A.I.s to ensure that when someone else was in command of a Task Force, their authority would be clearly understood. He also got pleasure from being able to address Valkyrie or any other A.I. as 'Commander'. Strictly speaking, she was the Commanding Officer of Resolute. He might be senior to her, but he was just a passenger. He could tell her where Resolute went and what it needed to do when it got there. She would decide how the crew could best carry out his orders, and he was entirely okay with that. By the time he got back to the Command Station, the lunar recon drone was close enough to get grainy video of the main lunar base which was still bathed in sunlight.

  "Damn!" he said in a low voice. The base clearly had been attacked by high-energy lasers. The scene reminded him of what the Nimitz base in the Avalon system looked like when Johansen's ship had gone there to check things out. There might be salvageable equipment in that rubble, but it might not be worth the time to look for it. In any case, that decision would have to wait for another mission. TF92 didn't have time for anything like that now.

  "At least we can be sure now that the enemy did come here at some point, CAG,” said Valkyrie.

  "What about the boneyard?" asked Shiloh.

  "Coming into view in 18 seconds, CAG."

  Shiloh held his breath and waited. The 'boneyard', a term left over from the late 20th and early 21st centuries, referred to a place where military vehicles were parked when no longer in use. When all the A.I.s had been evacuated from Sol, cargo capacity was in short supply, and all the fighters had set down at a small base next to an open flat area of the moon. Because they were designed to operate continuously in the harsh environment of space, they didn't need any kind of shelter or atmosphere. If the enemy had not destroyed them on the ground, then it would be relatively easy to re-activate them at some future point. When the 18 seconds were up, Shiloh saw to his surprise that all of the fighters seemed to be intact. If and when they were recovered, they might need to be refueled with heavy hydrogen in order to bring them onboard the carrier. The alternative was to send maintenance people in spacesuits out to the fighters to retrofit ZPG power sources to them there. In any case, there were 175 fighters that could be re-activated and brought back to Site B at some point.

  "Those fighters would be handy to have now, CAG. We still have almost 100 A.I.s that are sitting around twiddling their quantum thumbs," said Valkyrie.

  "I agree. It would be great if our idle A.I.s had fighters to keep them amused. We WILL recover them, but that will have to wait for another trip. Let's start scanning the moon for alien detection gear," said Shiloh.

  "Roger that, CAG. Search pattern has commenced." Scanning the moon's entire surface would take hours. In the meantime, TF92 would gradually move closer to the Earth while staying in its shadow, and they'd get a good look at the planet via other recon drones. A few minutes later Valkyrie said, "I'm getting usable images from our Earth drones, CAG. Here's what drone 1 is seeing." The main display showed a planet that didn't look like Earth at all. Instead of white clouds, blue ocean and green or yellow land masses, the planet was almost a uniform slate grey.

  "What the hell?" exclaimed Shiloh.

  "My spectral analysis suggests that the atmosphere is full of dust particles. The only known explanation for so much dust to be pushed into the atmosphere in the time since we last had contact, is that the planet has been impacted by one or more substantial asteroids," said Valkyrie.

  "How is that possible? We knew where all the potentially dangerous asteroids were and their vectors. None of them were on a collision course."

  "Unless the enemy gave them new vectors," said Valkyrie.

  "Son of a bitch! I'll bet that's just what they did!" said Shiloh. "It makes sense from their perspective too. They make the Earth as uninhabitable as it's possible to do with a relatively modest effort. Damn! That much dust will block so much sunlight that all plant life will die, and temperatures will drop to below freezing everywhere. How can anyone survive that?"

  "They couldn't, unless they went underground with several years worth of supplies," answered Valkyrie.

  "Yes, and we know that there are underground installations like that. The question is, did anybody manage to go down into them before being contaminated with the bio-weapon? AND if they did manage to do that AND if they have working radio gear AND if they're listening with it, we may or may not be able to send and receive signals through all this atmospheric crap. A lot of that dust is likely to contain iron or other metal particles that will interfere with EM transmissions," said Shiloh.

  "You're analysis is correct. CAG. The other consideration is that if we did receive radio transmissions from the planet, then any alien detection gear in the vicinity will receive them too. The enemy will know that some humans are still alive on Earth AND that they're communicating with someone in space," said Valkyrie.

  Shiloh nodded and sighed. "So that means we shouldn't try to establish communications with any survivors right now. They'll just have to survive as best they can until we know it's safe to establish two-way communication."

  "Do you want to continue this approach, or should I take us to the rendezvous point now, CAG?" asked Valkyrie.

  After a brief pause, Shiloh responded. "Resolute doesn't need to get any closer. You can take us back out beyond the gravity zone, but there's no point in jumping to the rendezvous point this soon. The others won't be there for a while anyway. In the meantime, we can continue to collect data on the Earth and moon."

  "Roger that, CAG. I'm changing vectors now."

  Shiloh sat back and folded his arms in front of him. The enemy had once again shown the extent of their xenophobia. They had gone out of their way to kill every last human they could find, even though a few thousand survivors of the bio-weapon, if there were that ma
ny, couldn't possibly pose any serious threat to the aliens for centuries. He remembered the last message sent by Admiral Howard. The aliens had called the tune. Now they had to pay the price for their aggressiveness. If he got the chance to do to their Home World what they did to Earth, he would do it.

  Resolute stayed in a wide orbit around Earth for another 22 hours. Low orbit passes by recon drones confirmed that the surface of the planet was now a frozen, dark hell. The scan of the moon showed no sign of any alien detection gear. As Resolute accelerated away from Earth in preparation for a short jump to the rendezvous point, Shiloh ordered the recon drones to attach themselves to the large space structures still orbiting the planet, which the aliens hadn't bothered to destroy. The drones would keep a continuous watch over the planet and record any transmissions from the surface for future action.

  When all elements of TF92 were back together again, the humans on board Resolute received more good news. All of the far flung infrastructure built by Space Force was apparently still intact. This included the refueling station on Europa, which Shiloh actually didn't care about any more, as well as all the asteroid mining, refining and shipyard installations, which he did care about. In fact, there were two freighters, the first heavy carrier and the mammoth million-ton battleship, that were still in their construction slips. Based on pre-collapse data, they should be very close to being usable. Shiloh was particularly interested in the heavy carrier and the battleship, but for different reasons. If they were going to recover all the fighters stored on the moon and take them back to Site B, Resolute and Valiant would have to make multiple trips, but if they could make the carrier Midway operational, then the three ships could bring back all the fighters in a single trip. The battleship might be useful in a different way. If the aliens who built that Very Large Object turned out to be a threat to Humanity, then a collision with a million ton projectile traveling at very high speeds would make one hell of a big hole in that huge sphere. The shock of the impact alone might be enough to kill every living thing on board. That, however, assumed that the ship could be moved and jumped, and their data suggested that it might not be that far along in the construction process. One more thing to do in this system which they simply didn't have the time to do. With the preliminary survey of the Sol system now out of the way, the Task Force lined itself up with the next jump destination and resumed its journey to Omega89.

  * * *

  Resolute emerged from Jumpspace at the outer edge of Omega89. The display was showing the tactical situation in nearby space using passive sensors. Having just emerged from a jump, Resolute had to coast while it attempted to find the rest of TF92 using flashing position lights that could only be seen from further out in the system. The main drawback to really long jumps occurred when two or more ships were jumping together. Transiting Jumpspace involved a vector that depended upon the direction the ship was moving towards in normal space. Two or more ships flying in formation had to be moving in precisely the same direction, down to ten decimal places, in order to be in any kind of proximity to each other after traveling dozens of light years in Jumpspace. The need to re-assemble the formation periodically was why TF92's trip time from Site B to Omega89 was longer than Gunslinger's transit the other way using a single jump. The temporary stops at the enemy home world system and the other colony system, while necessary, did not provide any useful information about those systems that the A.I.s didn't already know. Both systems had planets that were the source of radio and other EM transmissions, the sheer volume of which was the tipoff on whether that planet was the home world or not. Even after all this time, the A.I.s still hadn't been able to make any kind of sense of the alien transmissions.

  Now here they were on the outer edge of Omega89. Gunslinger had been closer to the center when he detected the Very Large Object or VLO as it was now being called. The plan was for TF92 also to micro-jump closer when they were back together again and traveling at a moderate speed. As he watched the display, a green triangle appeared with the designation of 007. According to the sidebar information, Raider 007 was piloted by Rainman. As more and more raiders re-established contact via low-power, tight beam com lasers, more icons appeared on the display around the flagship. Based on past experience, they should be back in formation in less than 20 minutes. Decelerating enough to maneuver for a micro-jump would take a while longer. Shiloh had been hoping that they could detect the VLO even from this far out, but Valkyrie had analyzed the faint light from the alien colony planet carefully. No sign of a VLO or anything else for that matter.

  "We're not picking up any transmissions from the enemy colony, CAG. Gunslinger was able to pick up some transmissions this far out. That's how he knew to jump closer for a better look."

  Shiloh didn't like the sound of that. Had the enemy received a warning from their future selves about TF92's mission and decided to shut down their transmitters? Or was the explanation simply that they had lost the battle with the VLO, and there was no one left to transmit anything?

  "Scan the rest of the system for any sign of the VLO," ordered Shiloh.

  After a longer than normal interval, Valkyrie said, "I've detected an object that appears to be moving away from the enemy colony planet. Since I can't determine the distance from this single light source, I'm not able to say with certainty if this is the VLO that Gunslinger observed, but it could be the same object."

  Shiloh nodded. With only one bearing, there was no way to tell distance. They would need at least two bearings from different locations to have any idea of distance, speed and vector. TF92 was still moving very fast and still pointed in a direction that would take it along the outer edge of this star system. He could order one or more of the raiders to micro-jump to a different part of the system in order to get another angle on the VLO, but getting that raider back to the Task Force would be tricky and time consuming. If the VLO was about to enter Jumpspace, then letting them have a good head start would complicate things. On the other hand, if he didn't get a better idea of where they were going before they jumped away, that would complicate things as well. He was hoping that he might get another vision, but so far there’d been nothing, and he felt it was time to make a decision.

  "Okay. Order Titan to detach one raider with instructions to micro-jump in order to get a second bearing on the bogey. You and Titan figure out the quickest way that the raider can rejoin the Task Force, given that I want to take a closer look at the alien colony planet. Any questions?"

  "Negative, CAG. I understand what you want. Titan and I have already figured out how to do this. Rainman has jumped and will be rejoining us in approximately 8.9 hours. The plan is that he'll slingshot around the colony planet to catch up to us from the rear."

  Before she could say more, Shiloh interrupted. "Wait a minute! If there are enemy aliens still on that planet, they might detect Rainman. His raider will be easier to detect than recon drones."

  "Your concern is understood, CAG. We compute that the likelihood of him being observed is small and even if they see him, how will they know that they're seeing a Space Force ship? It would be far more likely that they'd assume it belonged to the race that built the VLO. We are, after all, on the opposite side from Human Space."

  Shiloh relaxed. "Yes, that makes sense. Now since there's nothing nearby that could threaten us, and we've got a few hours before anything happens, I'm going to retire to my quarters for a meal and some sleep. I know that I don't have to tell you to wake me when we get close enough to observe the planet's surface or when Rainman contacts us with his sighting report."

  "You're correct, CAG. You don't have to tell me that, and yet you just did. You Humans are funny, CAG."

  Shiloh was still chuckling over Valkyrie's response when he left the Bridge.

  Chapter 3 Visit To An Alien Ghost Town

  As it turned out, Shiloh was back on the Bridge just in time to watch the video transmission from a recon drone that was approaching the planet. Rainman was still too far away to ensure that a
ny laser com burst could be aimed accurately at Resolute. The departing object had vanished and was assumed to have entered Jumpspace.

  "Your sense of timing is impressive, CAG," said Valkyrie.

  Shiloh smiled. It was just dumb luck, but he had no intention of telling her that. "Something I've developed from my many years in Space Force, Valkyrie. I take it we have images from our drone?"

  "I'm establishing the com link now, CAG." The main display switched from tactical to the video feed. This planet did not have a dust-filled atmosphere. It had less water than Earth and more desert. Only the top and bottom third, as defined by its axis of rotation, showed any green.

  "Anything in orbit, Commander?" asked Shiloh.

  "Negative, CAG. Orbital space is clear. Still no transmissions and the drone would be close enough now to detect heat signatures if there were any, but there aren’t. No signs of intelligent life at this point," said Valkyrie.