by M. D. Cooper
* * * * *
“What do you mean the ship’s empty?” Kora asked as she approached the crew standing near the Jay Rig’s airlock.
“Well, not empty empty,” the crew’s supervisor said with a sour grunt. “It has all the normal ship stuff in it…minus people.”
“How did it dock, then?”
The woman shrugged. “Engines, I assume. We just service ships, we don’t throw ropes around the hull and heave to.”
“Any chance they just left before you got here?” Kora asked.
“Nope, we were waiting at the airlock when they latched on.”
Kora shook her head. “OK, thanks. Mind if I go aboard and look around?”
“Knock yourself out. Nothing we can do till someone signs off on the resupply.”
Walking onto the ship, Kora immediately noted that the Jay Rig was clean. Exceptionally clean. The registry said it was a sixty-two-year-old pinnace, but the interior didn’t line up with that.
“Maybe they’re just neat freaks,” she muttered, knowing that it would be unlikely that she’d find any evidence of the mysterious Captain Belfas aboard.
After releasing a pair of small drones to survey the vessel, she walked down the single corridor to the cockpit, noting that three of the seats were still covered in plastic film.
“OK, a refit, then.”
The ship’s public network had only the most rudimentary log entries and information, but it did note that the current complement was only one crew member. Whether that was true or not was another question entirely. Kora flipped through the inventory, and it reported three EV suits in a nearby storage locker. Upon inspection, she saw that all three were still there.
Of course, whoever was aboard could have brought their own—or just altered the records.
She also considered that the ship had flown from Capeton to Hanging Garden on autopilot. NSAI were more than capable of doing that, and the onboard system could have faked a human during docking.
The ship had a second airlock on the port side, and she checked it for any evidence, though the only hint that it had even seen a human’s presence was a scuff mark on the floor that could have been made by anything.
she said to the NSAI that operated the station’s administrative offices.
Kora doubted it, but figured it couldn’t hurt to ask.
She interrupted the automation with her detective tokens and auth codes provided by Chancellor Tremon.
Kora walked back through the pinnace to the docks where the service crew waited.
“Is there really no external monitoring in this section of the station?” she asked.
“Not for a bit, no,” the woman replied. “A few days back, there was a fire in one of the relay nodes nearby, and the optics and a few other sensors for several berths around her went out. I think it’ll be a few more days till it’s fixed.”
Kora blew out a frustrated breath. “OK, thanks.”
* * * * *
The lock cycled open and she set her bags down, tapping her foot while the pressure equalized.
No response came from her crew, and Becky’s foot-tapping increased in tempo and intensity.
The inner door finally opened, and Becky stormed through, nearly running into a skinny, blonde woman who stood in the corridor with her arms crossed.
“Who the hell are you?” the Slyfe’s captain looked the woman up and down. “We didn’t ask for a cleaning service, we have bots for that.”
“I’m not here to clean the ship,” the woman replied. “I’m here to review your credentials before you go to Belgium for the coronation ceremony.”
Becky’s eyes narrowed. “You are? I thought I was already approved. I mean, why would I need to have any credentials checked? Everyone knows who my wife is.”
“Just policy right now,” the woman said. “I’m Rachella, by the way.”
“Great, well, what do you need? I have to depart in the next twenty minutes.”
“Yes, of course, I was just about to go to your bridge to get what I came for.”
Becky glanced back at the bags in the airlock and considered grabbing them, but decided to leave it for a bot. She attempted to connect to the ship’s NSAI to tell it to take care of her purchases, but it didn’t respond.
“That’s odd,” she muttered.
The woman sighed. “OK, I suppose that’s about as long as I could pull off that little charade.”
“What are you talk—”
Becky’s utterance cut off as the skinny woman pulled a pulse pistol from inside her jacket. “C’mon. Let’s get to your bridge. We have places to be.”
She tried to access the station’s network, but her Link wouldn’t connect to anything other than the shipnet, and nothing there was granting her any access. “What about Dara? Did you hurt her?”
Rachella snorted. “Hurt her? Why would we hurt our new crewmate?”
The statement didn’t make any sense to Becky, but at a gesture from the other woman, she slouched through the passages until she got to the bridge.
When the door opened, she saw Dara sitting at her console with a dark bruise around her right eye. A man sat in the command chair, and he smiled at Becky as she entered.
“Ah, good, our guest has arrived.”
“What are you talking about?” Becky demanded. “This is my ship! You need to leave now.”
Rachella shook her head. “We’re all going to leave together. We’ve got a coronation to get to, and you’re our ticket in.”
Becky’s eyes widened as she realized what was happening. “You’re kidnapping me!”
“Sure,” Rachella replied with a shrug. “Call it that if you want. Belfas, we ready to go?”
“You bet. Jerry and Jim have secured things belowdecks.” His lips parted, and a cruel smile settled on them. “Time to go kill us a mech.”
* * * * *
Kora reported to Gary from a nearby security office, where she’d been reviewing sensor data and optical feeds.
The lieutenant laughed.
Kora shook her head and double-timed it down the concourse, headed to the ViperTalon’s berth.
Kora considered that for a moment, and then a smile settled on her lips.
Gary chuckled.
The soldier’s chuckle turned into a laugh.
TAKING THE FIGHT
STELLAR DATE: 06.08.8950 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: GMS Marauders’ Lance, Chad
REGION: Burroughs System, New Genevian Alliance
“Hit!” Ona cried out as the Lance’s beams finally penetrated the lead cruiser’s shields and burned away its ablative plating. Gouts of flame burst into space, and one of the ship’s engines died, sending it into an uncontrolled spin.
Heather double-checked the heavy cruiser’s trajectory, glad to see that it would pass a hundred kilometers over the Lance.
“Keep point defense on that thing,” she warned. “They could still lob missiles at us.”
“Aye!” Ona snapped off her response, focusing the Lance’s weaponry on the second Nietzschean cruiser.
Four of the destroyers were also engaging the enemy ships, firing with wild abandon at the cruisers, as well as at the stream of dropships headed toward the Marauder dreadnought.
Tex snorted. “Niets are gonna wish they stayed in bed.”
The display above the pair’s holotable showed a series of tacnuke launches from inside the ship, and Heather couldn’t help but laugh.
“Bitty, I take it?”
Captain Karen nodded. “Not like I could stop him if I wanted to. He uses up tacnukes like they’re pulse rifle batteries.”
Nuclear blooms lit up amongst the incoming dropships, shredding several, but the combat net lit up a second later with mechs engaging ships that had punched through into the bays.
“Second cruiser is holed!” Ona announced, and Heather turned back to the main holotank and saw that it was spraying pods and dropships into space so rapidly, it looked like the ship was breaking apart.
“Oh shit,” she muttered. “It is breaking apart.”
“Musta hit something good,” Garth said. “Look, the third one is pulling away.”
The news was only half good. The three heavy cruisers had launched so many dropships and pods that the tracking systems were having trouble following them all. Estimates were fluctuating, but there were at least two hundred dropships and over a thousand escape pods—all headed toward the Marauders’ Lance.
Heather pursed her lips. The Niets had built the Lance to be the ‘main gun’ of a fleet, something heavily protected by dozens of destroyers and cruisers. She’d become so accustomed to having stasis shields that flying into the face of overwhelming odds with a ship that could barely maneuver on the best of days—and was sorely lacking in close-range defense beams—had seemed like a good plan.
Note to self: next time, jump in at least half a light minute from the enemy.
She shook her head, slowing her rapid breathing.
“They made it through!” Garth said a moment later, and Heather felt a wave of panic until she realized that he meant the Undaunted and the Fearsome.
Scan showed that the station would be able to fire past the Lance’s shields in eleven minutes.
“They’d better hurry up,” she muttered. “We wouldn’t want the Niets to kill us before the other Niets can kill us.”
Karen snorted a laugh. “Best I can see, they’re only going to get a few thousand troops onto the Lance. That’s not nearly enough.”
“They only have to take out the forward stasis shield generator,” Heather reminded the captain.
“CJ’s got it covered,” Tex added. “Going to take a lot more than a few thousand Niets to get past her squad.”
The mech’s words were punctuated by a shudder that ran through the deckplate, followed by a hollow thud echoing down the passageways outside the bridge.
“What—” the colonel began, only to be interrupted by Ona.
“Four dropships made it through. They hit just a hundred meters aft of us.”
“Did they breach?” Karen asked, grabbing her GNR’s barrel off her back and slotting it into place.
Ona nodded. “Bays A1 and A4.”
* * * * *
Sixteen mechs—down three from full strength, with Kelly’s team still back on Belgium—hurled through space toward a docking bay protected by nothing more than a grav shield.
A section of the shield died a second before the mechs reached it, and they blasted through the decompressing air to land on the deck.
Maglocks activated, and mechs unleashed hell on the bay’s automated defenses and a pair of station security who thought that their pulse rifles stood a chance against the heavy assault team.
Ten seconds after Crunch had given the orders to Whispers’ team, the mechs had secured the bay, and the emergency shield had snapped into place.
Motion to his right caught the sergeant’s attention, and he saw a group of ship technicians huddled under a cradle’s arms.
“Take it easy,” he called out. “You don’t shoot us, we won’t shoot you.”
The three fireteams flowed across the bay, checking corners and blind spots, making it to the interior doors in a minute. Once there, they formed up, with one/one stacked on either side of the door, and one/three and one/four covering them from a dozen meters back.
Crunch dropped a hackIt on the door control, and a few seconds later, it slid open to reveal four station security guards in light armor, holding multifunction rifles.
One raised his gun to fire, while the other three flung their weapons to the ground.
“Drop it!” Crunch thundered, and a fourth rifle hit the deck a second later.
“Ree-kah!” the mechs bellowed.
Ten seconds later, the four security guards were standing alone in the corridor, the smashed ruins of their rifles laying on the deck in front of them.
Crunch joined in with Kerry’s fireteam as they raced through the station, headed to the fire control center for three of the rails. They needed to go the one-kilometer distance across the station’s superstructure, and then six decks down.
They encountered light resistance at first, but as they drew near the FCC, they rounded a corner to see temporary barriers and grav shields blocking the passage.
Curtis glanced back over his shoulder, and the RR-4 banged a fist against the bulkhead.
The RR-4 nodded.
