Since he hadn't been able to implement his favorite pastime with the hot tankhead, he spent his time with his other love—supercarrier propulsion. He had been able to read and reread the Naval Ship's Technical Manual and the Ship Information Book several times. He even used his direct-to-mind (DTM) link with the transport's database to do some further reading on the Sienna Madira's history and design. Occasionally he would eat and sometimes sleep, and never did he get into any mischief or even slack any duties. So he was certain that he was clean. But being singled out by the CO on the first day of duty couldn't be good. He decided that the best approach would be to just keep his mouth shut and listen.
The two men exited the elevator and then wound through the large corridors of the supercarrier's upper decks. The dull gray metal bulkheads were lit by dim red exit signs and white fluorescent lighting overhead. Several times they would go up a ladder, walk a few meters across another corridor, and then go back down a ladder, only to travel a few meters more to go back up another ladder. Eventually they reached the elevator for the command tower and made it to the CO's office.
The XO tapped on the office door and waited for the captain to look up from his papers. "Captain, Lieutenant Joseph Buckley, sir."
"Yes. Come in, Lieutenant. Thank you, Larry. The rest of the crew is being taken care of, I take it?" Captain Wallace Jefferson asked his trusted XO.
"Yes, sir. Looks like a good bunch, sir."
"Good, Larry. Carry on." Jefferson nodded at his XO and longtime friend.
"Aye, sir," Chekov answered. He nodded and winked at the captain and left Buckley standing at full attention. "Good luck, Lieutenant," he whispered with a chuckle on his way out of the CO's office.
"At ease, son." Jefferson grinned and stood from his desk, offering Joe his hand. "I just wanted to shake your hand."
"Sir?" Joe took the captain's hand and shook it firmly, more confused than anything. The captain seemed sincere, and when he began speaking, Joe immediately understood what this was all about.
"Your father was a hull tech under my command on the day the damned Seppies did their mass exodus," the captain said.
"Yes, sir. You wrote his letter, sir. I've read it many times, sir." Joe choked down a lump that was starting to well up in his throat.
"If it hadn't been for Hull Technician Third Class Joe Buckley, we might have lost the ship and the fight. He gave the ultimate sacrifice so that we could stop those bloodthirsty heathens from destroying an entire city and the millions of people in it. Your father was a hero, and I'm proud to have had him serve under my command. We would have never known of his sacrifice had his AIC not downloaded a record of his actions just before they were both incinerated. I tried to capture the feel of what he had done in the letter, but I can let you hear the final report from his AIC if you would like."
"Yes, sir. That would be nice." Buckley thought it would be nice for his grandma to hear, but more than five years had gone by, and he wasn't sure that it would really do anybody any good to bring up those memories.
"I'll have my AIC, Uncle Timmy, pass it along to your AIC. And I hope to see you do your father's memory proud."
"Thank you, sir. I'm proud to serve under your command, and I will do my best, sir."
"Well, I'm afraid there's little time to get acquainted. We're about to start an operation in a little more than an hour from now, and I'm sure we'll need you down in the Engine Room. Good luck, Lieutenant."
"Aye, sir." Joe saluted the CO and thought of his father for the next several minutes as he wandered around the ship—absently trying to find his duty post.
"So the Madira will drop out of hyperspace just Solward of the Seppy outpost. We think there are frigates and battle cruisers in the area with the possibility of a hauler. Intelligence does show the area very active with Gomers. The last count showed more than a hundred Gnats and probably as many Stingers." Commander Jack "DeathRay" Boland continued with the recon portion of his premission brief to the pilots. As commander of the air group, or CAG, the pilots, all thirteen hundred or so of them, were his responsibility.
"There we will do rapid deploy and cover. I'll take the Gods of War out first in the initial ingress to the Seppy target and fly support to the Madira. Following the deploy phase, we will take this base. Poser and the rest of the Demon Dawgs will fly cover for the ground forces on the first pass deployment. I want you Dawgs sticking to your wingmen but nobody else. No, and I mean no, groups. The sky should be full of VTF-32s in random two-by-two locations covering the drop tubes so the tankheads make it down safe. There shouldn't be an arcminute of angle that I can't see an Ares-T fighter in." DeathRay paused and scanned the ready room to make certain that his orders were sinking in.
For the last four days he had wargamed this attack over and over in the advanced virtual Battle Operations and Scenarios Simulation Room at the center of the ship, which was officially known as the BOSS but more affectionately called the "Looney Bin." He had every intention that the mission should go off flawlessly. "Any enemy Gnats or Stingers you see out there, bring them down. If any other ships pop out of hyperspace on you, keep them busy. We must take this base at all costs."
"At the same time as the Dawgs are getting spaceborne, Colonel Warboys and the Warlords M3A17 drop tanks—"
"Hooah!" was interjected by one of the tank drivers. Bolan ignored it.
"—along with fifty armored environment-suit marines will be deployed on the enemy facility. The AEMs —"
"Oorah!"
"—and the tankheads will set up lines and hold them here and here. Note for you groundpounders and tankheads: space-time fluctuations around the facility show artificial gravity on the surface of about one-half Earth gravity, and there is no detectable atmosphere." At that point, two locations on the map of the Oort Cloud Separatist facility lit up in the three-dimensional display at the podium as Jack tapped them with the laser pointer.
"At the same time the lines are being formed, Deuce will have the Utopian Saviors in the FM-12 strike mecha crawling around that facility like stink on shit. Remember, we are not to destroy this construct here." Boland shined the green laser beam on a very large octagon shape with multiple towers at the limb of the planetoid facility.
The entire facility consisted of four irregular shaped Oort Cloud objects, each roughly twenty kilometers in diameter. The four icy objects were moored in the center via a large Seppy hauler starship that was about three kilometers long and one kilometer wide. The misshapen objects were stuck together with massive grids and metallic structures. The ships were moored between the four planetoids, and there were metal and composite structures crossing and zigzagging the base in a very makeshift and almost random fashion. Looking at the facility images conjured up thoughts of spliced wiring and miles of duct tape, all of it having gone horribly wrong.
Like an afterthought, or perhaps because the base was unfinished, there was a fifth, much larger, asteroid-sized planetoid about one hundred and fifty kilometers across, looming over the base on the same thousand-year orbit track around Sol. The object was only ten thousand kilometers or so from the main facility. From the surface of the facility, the asteroid would appear twice the size as the Moon does from the Earth.