All Enemies Foreign and Domestic (Kelly Blake series) by Rodney Smith Read Free Book Online

too few to stop the creatures, but the crew must be warned.   As she hit the ground, she rolled and pulled out her communicator to warn the crew.   Her two crewmembers drew their side arms and flanked her as she moved into the trees and shadows.
          She called into the sensor section and gave the order to shut and secure all hatches, but sensors didn’t respond.   She called in on the bridge channel and was told that there were five crewmen on the bridge and had managed to secure the bridge hatch before the incredibly swift creatures got there.   They had no reports from any other section. She ordered them to hold the bridge at all cost and told them she would get back to them as soon as she could.   She ordered them to send an emergency message to home world telling them they were under attack, describe the attackers, and to inform them the ship was in imminent danger of capture.
             Captain M’Taso headed up into the hills with the two crewmembers and hoped to put some distance between her and the creatures before they came looking for the three of them.   She hoped to make it up into the mountains to join up with her three four-feline geology teams.   Fifteen of them might stand a better chance of at least setting the ship’s self-destruct mechanism or, maybe, escaping.
     
    * * * * *  
     
          The sentient queen followed the second team into the ship.   She had three soldiers rush headlong up the main corridor to enter the bridge and kill every creature in there.   She had other teams going compartment-by-compartment, killing any of the creatures they found.   In less than thirty minutes, the ship was subdued, but she had failed to secure the bridge.   A handful of creatures had sealed themselves on the bridge.   The queen needed to find a way to gain access to the bridge.   She set her workers exploring every conduit raceway, air duct, and maintenance access tube to find a path.
          In less than an hour, a worker had found a maintenance tube below the bridge large enough for workers, but too small for soldiers.   She sent a runner back to bring forty workers forward to the opening into the tube.
          The workers arrived, she communicated her orders by touching antenna to theirs and the workers set off through the maintenance tube, giving them access to air ducts supplying the bridge.   The bridge crew didn’t know of the danger until the first worker dropped from the ceiling vent, followed by more than enough to overwhelm the side arm-issued bridge crew.   They couldn’t fire fast enough to kill the insectoids as they dropped from the ceiling and burst forth from the floor air return plenums.   The final dying act of the communications officer was to send the imminent danger message to G’Durin.
     
    * * * * *  
     
          Baron G’Rof had not given the tribunal an inch as he carried on with his spirited defense of his actions and decisions leading up to the battle of G’Durin.   He also was familiar with the careers of the five Unified Force commanders and had interacted with them over the years as they and he had risen in rank.   A voracious reader of after action reports, he used their own combat experiences to his advantage, reminding them of times in their own careers when they faced similar situations.   He settled fourteen of the fifteen charges against him, then turned to the final and most serious: dereliction of duty at the battle of G’Durin.
          “Warriors, the first specification says here that I was derelict in my duties by not maneuvering my forces at sub-light speed once I dropped out of FTL so as to hamper the enemy’s target acquisition capability.   Might I remind the tribunal that I had a force of almost 500 ships spanning an area of one-half million kilometers on the x axis, a million kilometers on the y axis and a half million kilometers on the z axis while traveling at FTL.   Warriors…that was a tight