“I sent them off.”
“Huh?”
“I took a subspace from the admiralty. We’ve got a situation in a nearby system. I ordered Wang out of here—the admiralty wants her listening skills elsewhere. A position to be defended—even more precarious than this one.”
“More precarious than half dug in on someone else’s old mining colony, our ships grounded, and nearly blind?”
“We haven’t been attacked yet,” Kelly said. She grimaced. “Also, we might just be expendable.”
Svensen glowered. “The devil we are. I’ll pack this up and pull out.”
Except as he looked around the command center at the faces staring back at him, he wasn’t so sure he could manage such a thing. These crew were a mixed lot from several different star wolves. Not only were a solid ten, fifteen percent of his fleet Albionish, New Dutch, and the like, but a lot of the Scandians had come on after the Alliance was formed. Some of the other wolves might not follow him out if Kelly countermanded his order.
She watched him, seeming to wait for him to calm down. He eventually did.
“I don’t like it any more than you do,” she said. “We’ve got a toehold, and there’s a habitable planet down below. If we can take it, we can hold this system and protect our home worlds. We need urgent reinforcements to make sure we don’t get tossed out. We can’t be sending off what little resources we have.”
“But you told Wang to jump anyway?”
“I have my orders.”
He snorted. “Oh, you do, do you? Then maybe you should give me a few more details. What exactly are your orders, anyway?”
“I don’t have much information, and what I do have I’m not fully at liberty to say.”
“It’s Blackbeard, isn’t it?” Svensen said. “She came back from her expedition and she needs defending. The admiral wants his precious ship protected.”
“That’s unimportant. Here’s what you do need to know. I’m to divide my forces and run a side mission.”
“Your forces?” He was so outraged by this that it took a moment for the rest of what she’d said to sink in. “Wait a minute, divide them how?”
“Three ships remain here, three ships for an expedition to the planet to make contact.”
“Make contact with what?”
“We don’t know that. Quite possibly hostile forces.”
“So, go down to the inner system and pick a fight. With three star wolves. And a partially built base with no guns or missile bays other than the ones we brought with us.”
“Apparently so,” she said.
“You’re out of your mind.”
“It wasn’t my decision. You have to know that—I told you there was no point in going to the planet, remember?” Kelly looked unhappy. “But I’ve been given orders, and I need to carry them out.”
“If the blasted admiralty told you to hurl yourself into the sun, would you do that, too?”
“I would assume that there was an important tactical reason for doing so. I might humbly ask why, but yes, I would.”
“Jörvak, inform the fleet,” Svensen said. “Stop everything. All work, all prep. Throw off that regolith and get the wolves ready to go. All of them. Everything back on board. We’re shipping out in six hours.”
“Wait!” Kelly said. “Belay that order.”
Jörvak hesitated.
“Do it,” Svensen growled.
Kelly fixed Boghammer’s second with a hard glare. “Obey that order and it’s a mutiny.”
“It’s not a mutiny, you miserable woman,” Svensen said, almost ready to explode. “Jörvak—”
“Can we talk about this, first?” Kelly asked.
“We just did. You put me down on this rock and then took away my sensors. Now you want me to divide and destroy my forces. And you claim that it’s your fleet.”
“Once you make that decision, once Jörvak makes his call, there’s no taking it back. Are you saying you won’t talk to me? In private? Where we can stop this disagreement before it gets out of hand?”
“It got out of hand the moment you sent off Wang’s ships without consulting me.”
“The admiralty will call it mutiny. The star wolf captains who follow you will call it rebellion. Either way, we’re going to have a civil war on our hands right at the moment some alien race is threatening human and Hroom civilization. You know what planets will take the brunt of it, don’t you? Roskilde, Odense, Hillerød. Viborg. Do you think Albion will defend those systems when you’ve got them in rebellion?”
Svensen had no good rebuttal for this. He licked his lips. Even the smallest concession was painful.
“Go ahead, then. Talk. You won’t get anywhere, but I’ll listen.”
“We can’t keep arguing in front of the crew,” Kelly said. “Come to my quarters—we’ll talk there. The rest of you, stay on task. Nothing changes until we come back.”
Svensen hesitated, but when he looked around the room at the worried faces, he knew what he had to do. They were beyond the inner frontier. An alien invasion was mounting somewhere, and the enemy most likely knew they were here. He could flee this base, probably even make it out alive, but what would happen next—for those who left, as well as those who stayed—looked grim.
Humans may be stupid. Tribal and violent. But they had to stick together when facing an existential threat. He glanced at the Hroom tech, staring at him with those huge eyes. And not just humans, apparently. The tribe expanded when it needed to in order to survive.
“All right. But you’re not going to convince me.”
#
Kelly jabbed her index finger in Svensen’s chest and looked up at him. “Listen, you dumb Viking, because I don’t want to repeat this. You are not leaving this base until I give the order. You are not going to mutiny, and you are not going to keep undermining my authority.”
“You have no authority. You are a torpedo specialist foisted off on me under false pretenses.”
“I have my orders.”
“The devil take your orders. They mean nothing to me.”
She kept glaring up at him, nostrils flaring. A lot of fire for someone he outweighed by a good fifty pounds or more. He could snap her in two.
His own temper was burning hot, so he turned away rather than goad her again, let her goad him in turn, and start a screaming match or worse. It gave him a good look at her quarters.
In only a couple of days, Elizabeth Kelly had taken this little alcove in the rock, buried fifty feet beneath the surface of the asteroid, and turned it into a cozy nook. A pair of throw rugs covered the bare stone floor, and she’d hung some other kind of rug against a wall so it didn’t resemble a prison cell like the barracks his men were building in base level 2.
Her bed was on one side of the room, and a hot pot–style stove on a table on the other. No bathroom, but she had a pipe coming down from the wall that seemed to have actual water pumped in from elsewhere. She’d even hung a picture above her bed of glacier-topped mountains surrounding a clear alpine lake—probably somewhere in the northern reaches of Canada on her home world of Albion.
When had she done all this? Didn’t the woman ever sleep?
“You see,” she said. “I wasn’t lying to you. I’m planning for the long haul. Dig in here and hold this piece of rock until the navy sends reinforcements. It was never my plan to pick up again and leave, but that’s just what they’ve ordered me to do.”
“Yeah?”
“Anvil, Boneless, and War Cry will stay behind and defend the fortress. Boghammer, Wasteland, and Icefall will make a run at the planet.”
Icefall held the nuclear torpedoes. Wasteland had a good pre-war captain and crew, and raiders with a fierce reputation, brutal in battle. Boghammer was Ulfgar Svensen’s own ship. It was exactly the three ships he’d have chosen, had he so stupidly chosen to divide his fleet.
“You don’t like it,” she continued. “I don’t like it, either. But something bad is happening, something that has the admiralty in a panic.�
�
“Of course they’re in a panic. Persia is cut off, and with it half the fleet.”
“There’s an alien force already in Nebuchadnezzar,” Kelly said. “They smashed a task force that was rushing out to reinforce the frontier.”
Svensen cursed. “How bad?”
“Hard to say—I’m going off a single subspace. Very little info. But if it was in Nebuchadnezzar, or possibly Xerxes, most likely it was the First Fleet, which means HMS Pulse, and maybe twenty more ships—cruisers, corvettes, destroyers . . . the works. Probably some Hroom ships, too. Maybe star wolves. It was a massive defeat, that’s all I know for sure.”
“Who is running things back there, anyway? The Hroom general? Or is that villain, McGowan?”
“I have no idea. We need Drake back. His ship is banged up and stranded, but the admiralty seems to think he should stay on the frontier. I sent Wang’s ships—we’re the closest forces to Blackbeard, and apparently they need the scanners more than we do.”
Svensen didn’t understand that. Albion scanning technology was superior to his own, but in any event, they were both operating blind until Wang crossed those jump points alone. Which meant she was vulnerable, too. A pair of war junks—it was a terrible risk.
“So what are we doing dividing our forces up piecemeal?” he said. “Screw this base, screw the planet. Let’s pack it in, take everything. Call Wang, have her hold position. Then we can jump over to Blackbeard and make a proper force together.”
“We have our orders.”
He pressed his stump hand to his forehead in frustration. “This is moronic.”
Kelly reached for his arm, but he shrugged it off. “We don’t have all the information. We just don’t.”
“And the admiralty does? Somehow, General Mose Dryz and Captain McGowan, bottled up in Persia, or back behind the lines—whatever—know better than we do? Just pretend we didn’t get the subspace. It happens all the time.”
“But we did. And I’ve got a response composed already.”
“But not sent.”
“It will be sent. I swear it.”
For a moment he toyed with the idea of overpowering her. Hauling her off by force, putting her in stasis, where she couldn’t do any harm, and swiftly purging her loyal forces before they realized he’d reassumed control of the Fourth Wolves.
At the same time, there was something he grudgingly respected in this woman. She was loyal to a fault. What an advantage to Albion to have people like Elizabeth Kelly in their fleet, knowing they could send her alone on foreign ships, into all manner of danger, and she would never flinch. The fractious Scandians were a disgrace in comparison.
“Reinforcements are coming to this system?” he asked.
“That’s what I believe.”
“That’s what you believe? I am so encouraged.”
“You want me to lie? Fine.” Kelly shrugged. “Let’s see . . . HMS Citadel and thirty support craft are on the way. A second fleet under McGowan and Peerless, too. They’ll be here by the end of the week. How does that sound?”
“Fine, so we may or may not have reinforcements coming. We’re sending three wolves down to the planet to investigate. Tell me what we do when we get there.”
“Drop into the atmosphere and check things out. If the aliens have a base, we nuke them and get out. If there are humans, we find their capital city and land raiders. Maybe knock them around to show we’re serious, then make them an offer.”
“And if there’s an alien fleet hiding in-system?” Svensen asked.
“Then we run for our lives. Unless you want to take them on with three star wolves.”
“Leading them right back here. To a base that is only half as strong as it would have been if we’d stayed here hiding and waiting for your so-called reinforcements to arrive. This plan is just as dumb as it was when you explained it to me in the command center.”
Kelly’s face hardened. “Will you obey orders or will you prove yourself a coward?”
“Cowardice has nothing to do with it, but nice try anyway.” Svensen nodded slowly. “I’ll obey.”
Her face softened slowly, but she maintained the same tone of voice as she switched to English, thinking, of course, that he couldn’t understand.
“Thank God. I thought I was a dead woman.”
Svensen couldn’t help himself, and responded in perfect English. “Don’t worry about that, Kelly. I was never going to kill you, only throw you on ice so you couldn’t cause any more trouble.”
Her jaw dropped, and he allowed himself a smile as he turned for the door and left her behind, gaping.
Chapter Eight
Four days later, Boghammer, Wasteland, and Icefall reached the planet that Kelly had inexplicably started to call Castillo. It was a Ladino word—apparently it meant “castle”—but Svensen didn’t think she’d chosen it herself. Kelly had received three encrypted subspace messages while they were traveling toward the planet, and it was after the second of these that she suddenly coined the term. The charts were rubbish, with three different names for the planet, dating back hundreds of years, and so the rest of the crew quickly adopted Kelly’s term. The three wolves lurked next to the wrecked, abandoned orbital fortress while they checked it out.
So it’s a castle, Svensen thought, looking down on the small blue-and-brown sphere rotating below them. Ours or theirs?
Kelly’s impatience was getting to her now, as she paced the command room, gnawing on her thumb. It was driving him crazy. She wheeled toward Lund.
“Anything?”
“Nothing yet,” the signalman said, “but we haven’t scanned all the frequencies yet. Give me a couple of hours to be sure.”
“What about heat signatures?” she asked. “Any major cities?”
“Not anywhere in this hemisphere,” Lund said. His tone was false patience. “But we don’t have the equipment to do a planetwide scan without pulling out of geosynch and making a few passes above the surface.”
“Sure would be nice to have Wang’s beetle ships,” Svensen said caustically. “If only they hadn’t vanished suddenly, we could have done this from the dark side of the moon.”
“I don’t think anyone lives down there,” Jörvak announced. “Not anymore.”
“Why do you say that?” Svensen asked.
“Look at the place. Would you want to live there?”
Probably not, Svensen admitted. Castillo had too much land and not enough water, leaving the center of the largest land masses parched deserts. Only the small equatorial continent had a large swath of contiguous green in the interior, and that appeared to be grassland, not forest. And given that Castillo was undersized for human colonization in the first place, the agricultural capacity of the planet was a fraction of what it would be on a world like Albion, Viborg, or Peruano.
Almost worse than that, it was .6 G. You’d grow up weak, with fragile bones. Throw you on a starship with 1 G gravity and expect you to fight royal marines—let alone raiders—and you’d feel like you’d grown up on an accursed world.
Svensen was inclined to believe Jörvak’s theory, except for one thing.
“The base had been overrun,” he said. “Every other mining colony we spotted was either abandoned or bombarded to rubble.”
“So the locals lost the war, decided they were living on a crap planet anyway, and evacuated,” Jörvak said.
“The word you’re looking for is ‘exterminated.’”
Svensen tapped a couple of buttons, and the viewscreen moved away from Castillo’s shallow green sea to focus on the nearest of the battered orbital fortresses. Craters littered the surface, and the main underground section of the base-slash-orbital elevator platform had collapsed, forming a deep depression. Bits of rock and other debris still orbited in conjunction with the fortress. The carbon-fiber elevator cable dangled toward the surface, severed midway down.
“How, exactly, did they evacuate?” he asked. “A hundred shuttles a day for twenty years?”
&n
bsp; “I don’t know,” Jörvak said. “We’re not finding anything, though, and it doesn’t look like Apex’s work. We’d see the buzzards’ factory complexes all over the surface.”
“You’re assuming that Apex is the only species out there capable of exterminating a planetary population,” Svensen said.
“Enough of this,” Kelly said. “The only way to find out is to go down and see for ourselves.”
Lund looked up from his work. “I’d rather have a couple more turns of the planet to be sure.”
“Nah, the lady is right,” Svensen said. “We’re wasting time up here.”
Lund looked uncertain. “If there’s still a city at the bottom of that elevator, they’re going to have missile defense—we don’t want to run into that.”
“So scan the ground below us, how hard is that?” Svensen said. “But stop looking for some planetary civilization that doesn’t exist.”
“I’ve already scanned it as much as I can. There’s ruins—you can get a visual for that much. Could be someone living down there, but I can’t tell.”
“Ruins aren’t going to sprout a missile defense.” Svensen glanced Kelly, who nodded her agreement. He called the other two commanders in his rump fleet and put them on visual.
Jan Helsingor, from Icefall. A tall, gaunt-faced fellow who looked like an executioner. Eirik Haugen, from Wasteland. He was clean, strong jawed, blond, and perfectly calm looking. But put the man in a mech suit and throw him into combat and he turned into a berserker.
“Icefall will stay in orbit and guard our approach. Anything pokes its head out and starts shooting, give ’em the pummel guns. But don’t hesitate to drop the nukes if things get crazy.”
Icefall’s captain, Jan Helsingor, gave a grim nod.
“Wasteland will land alongside Boghammer. We’re sending mech raiders into this so-called city. Explore if it’s abandoned. Tear it up if it’s not, then lay down our demands to whoever is in charge.”
“An excellent plan,” Haugen said.
He sounded a little too eager. It was all too easy to imagine a situation where Haugen “tearing it up” provoked just the sort of “crazy” situation that inspired Helsingor to bombard the surface with nuclear weapons. With Svensen in the middle of it.
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