by Terry Mixon
Brad came into sight just in time to see them toss Pitt out onto the deck. She groaned, so she was still alive, but he saw blood on her uniform.
“At them,” Brad ordered, drawing his mono-blade. “Blades only. We can’t risk puncturing a refueling line and igniting the fuel.”
This was the kind of fight Brad had trained his people so hard for. None of the troopers were masters like he was, but they could hold their own in a fight.
The pirates heard them coming and turned. One of the men had his helmet off and Brad had no trouble recognizing Jack Mader.
The Phoenix—leader of the Cadre—was there on the station.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“Kill them all,” Mader snarled when he saw Brad and his troopers charging. “Blades only or you’ll blow us sky-high.”
The Cadre commandos quickly spread out, their mono-blades springing to life. The two forces were almost evenly matched numerically. Brad hoped his men’s rush could carry the day, because if they got bogged down, they’d be in serious trouble.
“Fight me man to man,” Brad shouted. “Let’s settle this once and for all.”
Mader laughed as he activated his own blade. “Not bloody likely, boy. The Terror was an idiot for agreeing to that nonsense. If you want me dead, you’ll just have to take your chances with my men.”
His troopers and the pirates had come together in a line of flashing blue blades with him at the center. That wouldn’t hold once the fighting really got rolling. Blades were a weapon of individuals, not groups.
Keeping an eye on the pirates closest to him, Brad engaged Mader. If he could bring his skill to bear quickly, he’d turn the fight into a rout.
To his shock, Mader met his best attack with a laugh and a counterstrike that Brad only barely managed to deflect. The Cadre leader was better than he’d guessed.
The two of them exchanged blows until the tide of battle swept them apart. That pissed Brad off, so he took it out on the pirate that had separated them. The woman was good—damned good—but not up to his skill level.
It took half a dozen blows and twenty seconds, but he finally baited her into overextending herself and lopped her head off with a backswing. Bright blood shot into the air from her neck as her corpse fell, drenching the pirate right behind her directly in the face.
Brad followed up as the man frantically rubbed his eyes to clear them while wildly swinging his blade to defend against an attack he must’ve known was coming but couldn’t see. Rather than aiming for a body strike, Brad settled for taking the man’s weapon arm off just above his elbow, neatly disarming him. Literally.
He’d intended to finish the man, but Mader was abruptly next to him, furiously striking at his exposed side. The pirate leader’s attack was so sudden that he might have killed Brad if one of his troopers hadn’t chosen that moment to distract the Phoenix. As it was, Mader managed to cut deeply enough into Brad’s shoulder armor to draw blood.
Brad threw his own blade into the counterattack, leaving Mader to defend on two fronts. That should’ve led to the man’s speedy death, but the pirate adeptly parried both blades and counterattacked, striking low and taking the trooper’s leg off just below the knee. He took a matching wound to Brad’s in his own shoulder in exchange, but he didn’t seem bothered even as his blood spattered the ground.
The pirate leader retreated a few steps and allowed two of his commandos to block Brad’s advance.
“You’re as good as they told me,” he said with a nasty grin. “My uncle never knew what he was letting himself in for when he agreed to duel you. Too bad your people aren’t as good as mine.”
Uncle? Mader was related to the Terror? That might explain a few things, but Brad had no time to think about it now.
A glance at the fighting told Brad the man was right. His troopers were fighting hard, but they were losing. In all honesty, they’d already lost. Most of his men were injured or dead. Mader’s commandos now outnumbered them handily.
“This is far from over,” he shouted at the pirate leader. “I don’t know what kind of sick game you’re up to, but I’ll stop you.”
Mader threw his head back and laughed. “Good luck with that, considering you still have no idea what my true goals are. When this is all over, I’ll hunt you down and get a critique out of you before I kill you.”
He charged the pirates, but a new man stepped out of the shuttle with a shotgun raised. Brad barely had time to cover his face before the man fired into his armored body.
The impact of the pellets wasn’t enough to move him, unlike what the vids always showed, but his unconscious reaction to the blast sent him staggering back off the ramp. By some miracle of either luck or skill, none of the fuel lines ignited or tanks exploded.
Mader cuffed the man across the back of the head and took the weapon. “Idiot! Are you trying to kill us?” He shoved the man back into the shuttle and smiled at Brad.
“This has been entertaining, but we have somewhere important to go. If you don’t want to suck vacuum, you’d best run away like a good little boy.”
Brad watched Mader turn his back and walk into the shuttle. He was so angry that his vision tinged red. It had been a while since he’d let that monster loose into his soul. He thought he’d beaten it, but this had proven him wrong.
Lacking options, Brad helped his men gather those of their brethren who were still alive, including the wounded Pitt, and retreated out of the loading bay. He had no doubt that Mader would use the weapons on the shuttle to blow the lock as soon as he was clear.
They were out of the bay about ten seconds before the indicator on the lock turned blood-red. Mader had gotten clear in Brad’s shuttle and done exactly that.
“I have to get word to the ships,” Brad told the highest-ranking survivor while one of the medics slapped a rough and ready patch on his shoulder. “Send a runner for Colonel Saburo and get what help you can for the wounded. Lock this place fully down and round up all the miners.”
With that, Brad raced to one of the unloading bays nearby. They’d mapped them out before they’d landed, so it only took him a few minutes to get there.
He found the bay abandoned. There were three cargo shuttles that he could choose from, but all were only partly unloaded and had large bins of raw ore blocking their ramps. He’d have to clear one before he could take off.
Brad found a hand lifter and started moving the containers. The delay made him grind his teeth. With every passing second, it became more likely that Mader would escape.
After five minutes of backbreaking effort, almost as he was finishing, Saburo and several troopers came rushing in.
“Sorry I’m late,” his friend said, panting. “We ran into some unexpected trouble with the miners. Seems they wanted to fight after all. I hear you ran into Mader. Where is he?”
“Getting away,” Brad said, muscling the last container off the shuttle ramp. “I just hope he didn’t snooker Michelle. Any luck finding the jammer?”
Saburo followed him into the cargo shuttle. “No, but we’re looking. It’s sophisticated. We never even had a clue that our coms were down. We need to come up with some way of detecting that, going forward—it fooled all of our existing safeguards.”
Brad strapped himself into the pilot’s couch. “Secure the station. Treat everyone as a potential pirate. We’re going to turn them all over to Fields and let him sort this mess out. Now get everyone clear so I can lift.”
The Colonel retreated and Brad heard the ramp close. When it registered as sealed, he brought the cargo shuttle to a hover and moved it into the lock. The controls to cycle the lock were built right into the console, so he was quickly out into space.
The sensors on this tub sucked, but he was able to see his ships well enough. The stolen shuttle wasn’t visible, though.
It looked as if Mader might have escaped.
Brad kept trying to open a channel as he raced out toward Oath of Vengeance. The jamming field held until he was almost halfw
ay there. It was more powerful than he’d expected and acted like a blanket that smothered all his signals.
“Brad?” Michelle asked, her expression confused when he was finally able to connect with his ship. “What are you doing on that shuttle and who was in yours?”
“Do you still have the other shuttle on sensors?” he demanded. “Jack Mader and some of his Cadre commandos stole it. We have to stop them.”
Michelle stared at him for a few moments, her eyes wide. Then she spun in her seat to face Xan’s console. “Get Grant and Montgomery after Commodore Madrid’s shuttle. The Phoenix is aboard it.”
She turned back toward him. “They’re the closest. Your shuttle sent a message that you were going to check one of the nearby asteroids to follow up on a lead. We hadn’t heard any warnings once you’d locked the station down, so I didn’t think anything of it.”
“They started jamming us,” Brad said, his teeth grinding together. “Something I hadn’t seen before. It locked our coms down but didn’t give us any sign of jamming like we’d normally see. By the time I figured it out, he was already stealing my shuttle.”
He checked the controls and saw that he had another five minutes until he docked. “Come meet me at max speed. I want to get after him before he springs any other nasty surprises.”
That cut three minutes off his approach time and he was on Oath’s bridge a minute after docking. Michelle had already started his ship in pursuit of the two leading destroyers.
“Have Xan signal Bound by Law and Bound by Honor to join us. Horatio can oversee the securing of the station. If I know Mader, he has at least one ship around here somewhere and probably others close by. If he’s got that damned cruiser of his, I want to have the force to take it down. Captain Suzuki will just have to manage on his own.”
Five minutes later, they were almost to the asteroid that Mader had been heading for. Brad spread his ships out to have better sensor coverage and came in looking for an ambush.
Instead, he found absolutely nothing: no shuttle, no ship, and no hidden base. The pirate leader had just vanished.
“How sure are we that he was headed here?” Brad asked.
“He did come here,” Michelle said. “That doesn’t mean he stayed here, though. I can see half a dozen other asteroids that he might be behind now. Or he might have kept going. Once we lost sight of him, he had a lot more options.”
“Spread the fleet out a little more and get some probes heading for the potential hiding places,” Brad said, trying not to snarl. “The sonofabitch is here somewhere.”
Ten long minutes passed with no sighting.
“Contact!” Michelle said abruptly. “Bound by Law has your shuttle on sensors relayed from a probe. He’s further away than I’d have expected, but we’ve got him now!”
That was usually when things went south for them.
“Where’s he going?”
“There’s a smallish asteroid not too far ahead of him,” she said. “There’s not much room behind it, so I don’t think he could have a lot of firepower back there.”
Assuming his wife was wrong wouldn’t cost them much in the long run, so he’d be cautious. “Bring the other ships in close. If there’s nothing back there, he can’t escape us. If there is an ambush, we’ll have a better chance of taking them down without being gutted.”
They’d made up a quarter of the distance between him and Mader when the shuttle arced out of sight around the asteroid.
Twenty seconds later, a small ship came racing from behind the slowly spinning rock. It looked like a light frigate of the same class as the one Brenda Andre had commanded before she’d been discharged by Fleet. The little ships were small and fast but not strong enough to be a threat to any of the Vikings’ destroyers out in the open like this.
“Range?” he asked.
“She’s outside torpedo range,” Narendra said from the tactical console. “She’s really pushing her engines and we’re losing ground. I might be able to hit her with the Gatlings, but that’s a pretty difficult shot, considering her evasive maneuvers and the range.”
“Maximum speed,” he ordered Michelle. “Get us closer.”
“We’re going to be restricted in how much maneuvering we can do,” his wife warned him. “That little ship is faster than us in a straight-line race. We have a chance to gain a little distance with her jigging around like that, but a stern chase is a long chase.”
“Balance it with tactical. Narendra, let her have all our Gatlings. Maybe we’ll get a piece of good luck and take her out.”
It quickly became obvious this really was going to be a long pursuit if they didn’t manage to close the distance. Even though the little ship was right there, it was barely getting closer. If they didn’t take more of a risk, they’d be at this for hours. Hours during which other Cadre ships could intercept them.
And the Cadre had to have other ships in the area if they were planning an operation against Ceres. One that was far enough along for Mader to do a personal inspection. If the pirate hadn’t come here in one of his big ships, he’d have expected he could get to one fairly quickly.
“Reduce our maneuvering,” Brad ordered. “Get us into firing range sooner.”
The closing rate increased, but now some of the enemy’s Gatling fire was hitting them. Nothing their ablative armor couldn’t handle. Not yet, but that would change.
“Got her!” Narendra exulted a moment later. “Lucky shot. She’s losing a little speed. We must’ve clipped an engine.”
“She can’t escape now,” Michelle said. “She’s turning.”
“Keep up the Gatlings,” Brad ordered. “Launch torpedoes as soon as we come into range. Open a channel to the ship, Xan.”
When the light on his console indicated the com circuit was live, he started speaking. “This is your last chance, Mader. Surrender now and you’ll live a little longer. A little.”
There was no answer, but then again, he really hadn’t expected one. That was fine. He’d rather kill the bastard anyway.
Their victory was inevitable. The frigate didn’t have a chance against even one destroyer in a head-to-head fight. Against five, the little ship was doomed.
The heavy mass drivers on Bound by Law found her first, ripping the pirate’s hull wide open. Then one of the leading torpedoes slammed into what was left and blew the frigate apart.
“Yes!” Brad exulted. “Cut speed and we’ll see if we can find any survivors.”
Xan frowned. “Signal from Horatio. There’s another ship approaching the Kobayashi Station at high speed. They think she’s another frigate.”
“Just one ship? It might be a lure to get them away from the station. Have them hold position. Signal Grant to search the wreckage while the rest of us head back.”
“Fabia said it doesn’t look as if they’re heading for the station,” Xan said a minute later. Then he cursed and turned in his seat. “She’s stopping at the asteroid where this frigate had been hiding when we found her.”
Instantly, Brad realized that he’d blundered. Badly. He’d assumed Mader had boarded the frigate and run for it. Instead, the pirate must’ve hidden his shuttle in a crevasse on the asteroid and let Brad hare off on this wild goose chase while he waited for another ride.
Now his enemy was escaping—for real this time—and there was nothing Brad could do to stop him. Horatio wasn’t close enough to catch the second frigate and neither was he.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Brad fumed all the way back to the station. He couldn’t believe he’d been such an idiot. He’d fallen for one of the most basic dodges he’d ever heard of. It was humiliating.
He’d been lost to his anger for the first time in years. So eager to get the bastard that he’d gotten tunnel vision and forgotten to cover all his bases. Now Mader was gone.
All Brad had accomplished was delaying the attack on Ceres. Hopefully, the lack of a stashed fuel supply really would make them abort or delay.
“You can
’t blame yourself,” Michelle said, putting her hand on his shoulder. “None of us thought of it either.”
“But I should have,” he said bitterly, raising his eyes toward her. “That’s what experience is for.”
The corner of her mouth edged up. “You’re a Platinum-rated mercenary commander, but you’re not omniscient. Mader is also experienced, one of the craftiest opponents we’ve faced. I’d wager he never goes anywhere without an escape plan.”
Brad snorted a bit before shaking his head. “I appreciate what you’re saying, but he fooled me on the station and again here. I came swaggering in like I owned the place, and he used my overconfidence against me.”
Xan cleared his throat. “We have a signal from Horatio. The frigate sent them a message before it got out of range. Video and audio.”
Perfect. The bastard wanted to gloat.
“Put it on the main screen,” Brad said, sighing.
An image of Mader appeared. He was sitting in the command chair on a frigate, grinning. “Well, I suppose you’re right pissed now, aren’t you, boy? Let that be a lesson to you never to underestimate your betters.
“You’ve set me back here in the Belt, but don’t think this will slow me down long. You think you understand what I’m doing, but you’re out of your league there, too. I have things in motion that you can’t begin to fathom. By the time you do, you’ll be screwed, blued, and tattooed.”
He leaned back in his seat, his grin fading back to a smile. “Still, I’ll admit you’ve done better than any of us expected. Particularly as ignorant of the…situation as you are.
“I won today, but I think I’ll throw you a bone now that it doesn’t matter. Word is that you’ve finally figured out that your little friend Falcone never made it where she was supposed to be.”
Brad sat up, his jaw clenching, wishing he could respond.
Mader let the silence drag on for a few moments and then grinned again. “I expect you think I’ve killed her. My reward to you for almost catching me is to tell you that she’s still alive. Better yet, from your point of view, the information about where she is can be found on the station you just captured.
