Confederation -- 36

Chapter 36

As soon as we arrived in Earth orbit, I placed a call to Jake's headquarters, hoping to speak to him. We'd left the smallest FTL spaceship in his care, and it appeared to be missing. Our sensors couldn't detect it anywhere in the system.

Of course, a solar system is a big place. The ship could be anywhere and be very hard to detect, especially if the engines were shut down. Even when running, the Em-drive didn't give off much of a signal.

My major fear was that the Pugs had shown up again and recaptured the ship. I was worried about that, but then an alternative occurred to me. Perhaps he'd used it to strafe the Motherland group and flown too low. The ship wouldn't survive going deep into the atmosphere. As good as the deflector shield was, the friction of all of that air would most likely slow the vessel too much for it to regain orbital velocity. The Em-drive relied on a constant acceleration for its speed. It didn't have enough thrust to kick the mass of the ship out of a deep gravity well.

Our call to Denver was finally answered. I was a little surprised to hear Judith's voice. I replied, "Judith, is that you? Where is Jake? Oh, and where is his spaceship?"

Her voice came through with a little static, "Dec! I'm glad you're back. I don't know where the Warlord is. He was going out to get an asteroid. The Motherland gang has been moving our way in strength, and he decided to do what you told him. You know, drop rocks on them."

I grimaced. Of course, he'd do something unexpected like that. I should never have mentioned KEWs to him. I asked the next important question, "How long ago did he leave?"

I had kind of hoped that maybe he just took off to explore or something, but if he were looking for rocks, he'd probably have headed for the asteroid belt. There were closer objects, but most likely, he wouldn't know how to find them.

She answered, "It was four days ago. I thought that he'd be back by now. The enemy is practically knocking on our door. They're right back where they were before. Denver is surrounded on the east side."

The Motherland Army! Their self-styled President was rapidly becoming my primary irritant. He was going to have to be removed from control. It seemed like all he wanted to do was to expand his territory at the expense of those already living in the areas he wanted. That kind of behavior was exactly what I did not want in my planned confederation.

I took a deep breath, calmed myself, and asked, "Can you hold out for a couple of days, or do you need assistance immediately?"

"We're fine for now. They haven't gotten completely organized. My scouts have reported that the Motherland Army looks like it's waiting for some heavy artillery to arrive. It's still a couple of days away from their lines, so they probably won't do anything for at least that long," she said.

The radio clicked momentarily, and then a burst of static came through. It was pretty loud, and it continued.

Frazzle looked at me and made some adjustments, then said, "Somebody down dere is jamming. That's a primitive transmitter, a jump-gap sparker. It makes lots of noise and drowns out other signals. Not too hard to build, so I 'spect they could make it work if they have battery power."

"Can you get a signal down to Judith so we can finish planning?" I asked.

"Not unless she got another kind of radio. The one at the Warlord's place is not good for that. It's human-made and old. I don't think it can get through the noise."

I was disgusted, "Rats!"

Frazzle jumped in startlement, "What! Where be rats?" He looked wildly around.

I couldn't help myself. I snickered at him a little, "No! Not any rats here. It's just a saying. It means I'm frustrated."

He visibly relaxed. "Not good to joke about dem bad things. Long time ago, before Pug-bears, when Sunnys came to your planet, we got some of rats on our ship by accident. Very hard to get rid of. We have to put on suits and open ship to space to get them out. They eated lots of wires and caused big problems. Sunnys now got rules to keep from happening."

I grinned, "Well, you can count on my cooperation. I don't happen to like rats, and I definitely don't want any on our ships."

I changed the subject: "Let's move out to the asteroid belt and see if we can locate Jake's ship."

He turned back to the control panel, "Okay. I do."

We proceeded under Em-drive thrust, outbound towards the region between Mars and Jupiter. There was no sense going at maximum acceleration since I didn't want to have to slow down radically when we got there, but we didn't waste any time. The trip would only take a few hours at the speed we were traveling.

I wanted to insert into the asteroid zone at a shallow angle and then gradually turn inward towards the arc of its orbit. I was determined to find Jake, even if I had to circumnavigate the Sun completely.

I figured that he would have headed straight away from the Sun towards the asteroid belt. That was most logical. The ship should be located in a relatively small portion of the zone if he'd done that. I couldn't imagine that he'd gone to the other side of the Sun to find a suitable rock to convert into KEWs.

We passed Mars' orbit uneventfully. The planet was currently far around the Sun from where we were, so there was nothing to see until we got closer to the myriad of small and large rocks between Jupiter and us. Even then, there was little to see. Our asteroid belt has a lot of objects in it, but they are small, and space is vast. You'd have to be very unlucky to hit an asteroid, even if you took a random path through the zone.

A little after we passed Mars' orbit, the detector pinged. There was something out there. It was faint, as if the ship's power was barely on. There was no engine signal, and when we tried, no response to the comm signal.

Frazzle approached the location cautiously. It was in a slightly denser area of the belt, and there were a couple of larger asteroids hanging around, spinning on their mindless path. The pings grew steadily stronger as we approached.

We moved past a large, wobbling rock, and there it was. Not something I'd hoped to see, though.

The view out of the bridge window was horrifying. Framed against the backdrop of Jupiter and its moons was Jake's ship – what was left of it. Pieces of it, small and large, were floating in a loose swarm. A little beyond the wreckage was another ship. It was drifting slowly towards Jake's wreckage. It was intact, save that a large portion of the hull had been dissolved, including the majority of the bridge.

Liz gasped at the sight and turned to me, her eyes wide and dark, "What happened? Is – is Jake gone?"

"Frazzle, is that one of the Pugs' ships?" I asked, pointing.

"Maybe. I don' know, but it must be," he concluded.

Jake must have been occupied trying to figure out how to capture a rock when the Pugs came along. There had been a battle, and both ships were destroyed. I wondered how he'd let the enemy get so close, but then I thought that the Pugs might have thought they were approaching one of their own FTLs. They would probably have tried to raise him on the comm, so... I really had no idea what happened. All we knew was that both ships were now total wrecks.

We poked around, investigating the wreckage. The weak signal was coming from the Pugs' ship. I checked mentally, and there was no sign of life in either of the two. Both had probably been opened to space before anyone could don a spacesuit. We did see some frozen Pug bodies, but there wasn't a sign of humans anywhere, which was a bit of a mystery.

I was forced to conclude that the humans had all been caught in an anti-matter beam. The fact that Jake's ship was in fragments seemed to lend credence to that idea. It still bothered me, though. There should have been at least one human body remaining. I was left with a disturbing feeling that there was some kind of mystery there that I was not going to solve.

Nothing in the wreckage was worth salvaging, so we turned sadly back towards Earth, wondering how the Denver area would cope without Jake.

The only good thing about the situation was that Jake had somehow destroyed one of the last two Pug ships. Now there was only one to worry about.