Rodney Smith - First Command

Bart and Silke went back to his apartment and spent the weekend celebrating their imminent reward. Bart wondered if it might be enough to retire on. He’d heard of a hidden world run by pirates, if they could only find it, which sounded like a perfect retirement location.

Colonel David Little had been a brigade commander assigned to reinforce the New Alexandria Ground Forces during the second battle of New Alexandria. Sergeant Major Frank Days had been his senior enlisted advisor. Little had been on a fast track to a star and planned to take Days with him as he rose in rank. After the New Alexandria campaign, he was informed he would not be considered for a star because he had no combat experience as a brigade commander. The K’Rang invasion fleet had been destroyed before they could land any ground troops for Colonel Little to fight.

When he was told this in a phone call from his mentor and superior, he exploded and said things to a two-star general that could have gotten him court martialed; instead, it got him relieved from command three months early. That effectively ended his career. After that, Little felt betrayed by a service to which he’d devoted his adult life.

It was time for him to get some payback. He found out what bars were of interest to the local counterintelligence detachment and frequented them, letting his dissatisfaction with the military be known. It wasn’t long before he came to the notice of some shady types and was recruited. He smiled when they encouraged him to apply for the special ring security detachment.

Little and Days had excellent records and were approved for the special ring security detachment. As the senior member, Colonel Little was made acting chief. A one-star admiral was to be the eventual chief, but had not yet been confirmed by the Senate. The Colonel and Sergeant Major settled in and established the processes for the office, effectively ensuring they had access to every code. After a week, Little transmitted the success code to the cooking forum and received a dead drop code in return.

Frank Days made the drop by placing an envelope containing the codes, triple sealed in plastic bags, up onto the smoke shelf of the crumbling chimney in an old abandoned house. Two days later they received another dead drop code. When they opened the package in Days’ apartment, there were two packages of backdated stock certificates totaling 200,000 credits. Days and Little celebrated with beers.

In his triumph, Little completely forgot that becoming visible in those bars of interest to the counterintelligence detachment had made him of counterintelligence interest.

Pixie’s brainstorm worked. The Vigilant’s sniffers could detect the chemical signature of K’Rang bodily waste. Unfortunately, the Vigilant could not determine which ship contained the K’Rang in the orbital parking area holding over 200 ships without spooking the courier ship. Alistair did some magic with the planet’s servers and increased his computational power exponentially. He called up the ship’s logs for every ship that had entered Shepard’s space in the last four weeks. He let the combined computing power look for anomalies. In seven hours, the computer spit out three ships. One was an ore carrier, another was a cargo and passenger ship, and the third was a decommissioned military gunboat converted to civilian use.

Sensors plotted out the ships’ locations in the parking orbit. Kelly looked at how the three ships were parked in relation to each other and had navigation plot a course that would put the Vigilant in close proximity to all three ships. When plotted out, it looked very similar to a standard approach pattern, which gave Kelly an idea.

The Vigilant left orbit and looped around the next nearest planet. It came back lined up on the vector to pass all three ships and started a standard approach. Kelly called to Shepard Station and requested docking at the station, also on the same vector.

In sensors, Pixie jumped up and shouted, “Bingo!” when they passed the second ship, the combined cargo and passenger ship. She had found the K’Rang courier ship.

Kelly had them put the visual of the ship up on their main monitor. Kelly couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw the paint scheme, crimson red with an eagle’s head on the bow. It was so obvious that nobody would suspect it. He kept his ship on course for the station and docked long enough to send Connie and Cookie with a shopping list and a set amount of credits. They bought spices and delicacies and returned to the Vigilant.

Kelly departed the station and made a low angle approach to the planet. He kept them on this vector until they pushed beyond the spot where the K’Rang courier ship’s sensors could still range on them and had them climb back up to dock with Alistair.

Alistair spent the time that the Vigilant was away to break out more data on the cooking forum discussions. He found he could decipher more of the spoofed data and find out from which planet the reply messages came. The first reply originated on Tereshkova, to a recipient on Shepard. The second came from Shepard to a recipient on Gagarin. The third came from Shepard to a recipient on Earth. The first message was from four weeks ago and must have been from another courier ship or the one here on its transit in. Alistair deduced that the courier ship would need to leave here after it retrieved the first package and go to Earth and Gagarin to pick up those packages. Kelly agreed and proposed to move his ship out to the edge of the star system. There he would monitor the ship and follow it when it left to retrieve the data from its next stop.

Alistair composed a message to a counterintelligence office in Fleet Intel HQ. This office dealt with espionage cases involving compromised Fleet Intel officers. He provided all evidence he had so far gathered on the agent network. It was up to them to decide which individuals to roll up and which to turn, and which to continue to watch.

Cindy arranged another special lunch for Valeri. She was quite energetic about it and left him snoring on his couch. She had little sense of accomplishment from that. He had been working so hard on his weapon systems that he was one blink from falling asleep most days. She let him sleep.

She walked into the lab, without bothering to put on so much as her now signature lab coat, and sat down at the CAD/CAM terminal. She called up the complete designs for his hand weapon and an assault rifle that would use the disruptor technology. She included the large caliber shipborne weapon design, even though it still had the energy supply problem, and copied it all to a clean data device.

She put the data device into a compartment behind her pocket terminal and returned to her sleeping beauty. She knew just how to wake him.

Cindy did not hate Valeri. He was just a means to an end. She liked, no, loved fancy things and keeping herself beautiful. That required more credits than a lab assistant made. Her K’Rang friends had lots of credits, and all she had to do was move within the theoretical physics community and get hired to work on the latest technology. Her high grades from the Delosian Institute of Physical Sciences, plus her long legs and firm breasts, usually put her on the short list for hiring wherever she applied. Valeri was the first male to hire her that actually read her transcript and master’s thesis. It was so unusual that she blushed at her job interview. She thought that blush was one reason he hired her.

He had certainly never made any advances on her. He had assumed she and Ron were together, seeing as how she so strongly lobbied for him to be hired. Even her flirting with Valeri was never the cause of reciprocal flirting in response. She finally had to take matters into her own hands with their special lunches to get him to give her a tumble. Even that couldn’t cure him of his workaholic ways. She worked around him totally naked one afternoon and he never even noticed, while he tried to work out the power supply problem for the larger caliber guns. It was most frustrating.