Vaughn Heppner - The Lost Starship

Well, life hadn’t been easy. Smiling at problems hadn’t helped her any. She’d had to lower her head and charge through her problems. Stubborn pride and hard work had been her secrets.

“So what’s the plan now?” Valerie asked.

“First. I need to know how much you know.”

“Sure. We’re off on the wildest goose chase in the galaxy. We have to find a place that doesn’t exist and commandeer a warship that can do the impossible. Is that the same mission you’re on?”

“If you feel that way, why did you agree to do this?”

“Why did you?” she shot back.

Maddox studied her before saying, “I believed your story about the battle with the three starships.”

“And?” she asked.

“And we need that alien sentinel if we’re going to defeat the invaders.”

“You think the ancient ship exists?” Valerie asked.

“Don’t you?” he asked.

Valerie shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s possible, I suppose. It doesn’t seem very probable, though.”

“If it doesn’t exist, how do we defeat the New Men?”

“Oh, so we’re done calling them them ?”

“We’re in private, not in public.”

Valerie closed the button she’d undone. “In my opinion, the New Men can’t be invincible. I don’t think anyone is. All you have to do is find their weak point and exploit it.”

“I’ve heard worse theories. But what if our point turns out to be weaker than theirs?”

She frowned. “They have a deadly beam. We should start researching like crazy, using what I recorded from the battle. In time, we’ll probably duplicate that beam. That will give us a weapon to bypass their shields. Until then, we play for time in order to do our research.”

“And if they invade en masse before we’re ready?” Maddox asked.

“Then that’s how we stop them,” Valerie said. “We hit them with mass, trading ten ships for one of theirs.”

“What if they have too many ships to make the formula sustainable?”

“I doubt they do. We must have a far larger population and industrial base.”

“Hang on,” Maddox said.

She glanced at him, not getting it.

“Hang on,” he repeated. “We’re going to turn.”

Oh. She grabbed an armrest and hunkered lower.

Maddox banked the flitter, and he took them down fast.

“Where are we headed?” she asked.

“Scotland.”

“Any particular reason?”

Maddox nodded. “We have to get our pilot.”

“Who is he?”

“Keith Maker.”

“Where in Scotland is he?” she asked.

“At this time of the day,” Maddox said, cocking his head. He seemed to be thinking. “He should be in a pub in Glasgow, beginning his afternoon beer. He likes to take his time with those. Later in the evening, he’ll start on the whiskey shots.”

“What kind of pilot is he?” Valerie asked. “The man sounds like a drunk.”

“Indeed,” Maddox said.

She gave him a dubious look. “You’re kidding me, right? We’re not really going to recruit a drunk for the mission.”

“By recruit, you mean get him to voluntarily join us?”

“What else would I mean?” she asked.

“Ah. I see. No, we’re not going to recruit him.”

“Well, that’s a relief. Then what are we going to do with a drunken pilot in a Glasgow pub?”

“Kidnap him,” Maddox said.

Maddox let the flitter drop toward Glasgow. He’d taken himself off the traffic control net as they’d lifted from Paris. Because of an advanced anti-tracking device, the machine would be incognito for an hour, maybe two hours if he was lucky.

Given enough flight time, there would be an anomaly somewhere. That would alert the planetary tracing system. A clock would begin ticking then: the countdown. At that point, it would only be a matter of time before the tracing system cracked his invisibility. He had to be gone from Earth before that happened, or it would jeopardize the entire mission.

The kidnapping attack against Lieutenant Noonan deeply troubled him. The brigadier had suggested the New Men had infiltrated the Star Watch with agents. The strike against Noonan would seem to prove the enemy had burrowed much farther than he’d believed possible after leaving the Lord High Admiral. It made more sense now why Cook and O’Hara had set up the operation the way they had.

Humanity was up against a deadly enemy. If the New Men were smarter than people, as regular humans were compared to chimpanzees, what chance did humanity have?

Is humanity the old breed, the obsolete model? How do you defeat a superior foe? The New Men know us, but we don’t know them. Right now, our advantage appears to be numbers. Are they using the women on Odin, Horace and Parthia to breed vastly more soldiers? Will they outnumber us in twenty years?

Maddox scowled. He needed to concentrate on the task before him. He’d read the personnel files in the brigadier’s office. It gave him a rundown on the candidates. He didn’t really know them yet. Their files helped him to know what to look for.

Lieutenant Valerie Noonan clearly had issues. Who didn’t, though? He’d observed her in the mall dealing with the first kidnapper and the second. The woman knew how to handle herself in a tough spot, although she wasn’t a professional in that department. He had begun to take her measure during their conversation during the short flight.

In his opinion, Lieutenant Noonan wanted acceptance. She keenly felt herself as the outsider. She also carried a two-ton chip on her shoulder. Maddox found it telling that she didn’t rely on her beauty. It told him she likely didn’t believe herself to be beautiful. The concept was preposterous, but there it was, blinking like a neon sign.

From what he’d read, observed and heard from her own lips, he believed she must be an excellent navigator. She might prove to be a difficult companion in the scout, though. Valerie had not liked his running speed or his competence. It threatened her. He was certain anyone who could do something better than Valerie Noonan threatened her. Like most things in life, that had its good sides and its bad. She would not quit easily. Good. The mission would likely prove to be extraordinarily difficult. Quitters were not welcome.

That brought him to Keith Maker. By the file, the drunkard was a quitter. He found the ace’s inclusion on the mission as highly questionable. The man’s brain patterns seemed as if they were the only qualifier.

“Don’t crash us,” Valerie said, sounding worried.

Maddox leaned to his left, looking down at the city. Individual buildings rapidly grew in size. It was one thing to fly a spaceship and another to pilot a flitter about to wreck.

For Valerie’s sake, Maddox eased the rate of their descent. Then he continued to think.

A few years ago, a painfully young Keith Maker had shot down six enemy strikefighters and five bombers, one more than he’d needed to become an ace. He’d fought in the Tau Ceti Conflict, a system-wide civil war. The Star Watch had quarantined the fighting to Tau Ceti. The split on Earth, and on many colony worlds, as whom to back had threatened a larger rift in the Oikumene. Because of that, the Commonwealth Council had decided to let those on Tau Ceti settle the issue there.

Before the quarantine, Keith Maker had joined the gas and asteroid miners rebelling against the Wallace Corporation. He’d been on the losing side. Not that Keith had been around at the end. Before that, the miner chiefs had grounded him. The reason was that he’d endangered his squadron with his drinking. The dividing line in Keith’s combat career had been his brother’s death, a fellow pilot and his wingman.