Bound by Honor

by Terry Mixon

  “Target torpedoes on the Warrior,” Brad ordered. “As soon as we’re in extreme range, open fire. If we let them get too close, they’ll rip us apart. They all have battle damage, so let’s use our better condition to our advantage.”

  “The enemy isn’t dodging as much as I’d expect,” Narendra said. “That made the destroyer more predictable, I think. Could it be the fact that they didn’t refuel as expected?”

  Brad started to dismiss the idea but then remembered that Mader had ordered his ships to take extra fuel from some of the ships meeting his force. If they took enough, those ships could be extremely low on fuel and trying to conserve as much as they could.

  “Plug that into your tactical calculations,” Brad said. “Pass it on to Law, Honor, and the Fleet ships. We all knew it, but we didn’t count on there being such a big effect from it. If we’re wrong, we don’t lose much. If we’re right, we could flip this around.”

  They didn’t get any other lucky mass-driver hits, unfortunately. The next big moment in the battle came when Narendra fired eight torpedoes at the Warrior.

  His ships drew almost five times that number in return and went into evasive action while transitioning their smaller Gatlings to defense. The Cadre destroyers each picked one of his ships as a target, while the light cruiser split her fire between Law and Honor.

  At least one of the Bound-class ships had focused on the Warrior, because that ship had the bad luck to catch at least one heavy mass-driver slug while the incoming torpedoes were on final approach, screwing with her defensive fire at a critical moment.

  Rather than stopping most or all of the incoming torpedoes, they only managed to stop two. Two more missed the big destroyer, but four slammed into the ship at almost the same moment.

  The Warrior exploded.

  That didn’t mean everything was turning up roses for the home team, though. Law stopped all but two torpedoes with defensive fire or reactive armor, but those last two got in solid hits, knocking the destroyer off course. They indicated they had substantial damage but were still in the fight.

  Honor took one unlucky hit on a heavy mass-driver turret, cutting their offensive fire in half. They were otherwise undamaged.

  Oath of Vengeance managed to avoid any crippling hits, but they had a lot of damaged systems. Nothing that couldn’t be repaired after the fight, though. If they survived.

  The enemy destroyers hadn’t come out of the exchange unscathed. One of them had eaten a few heavy mass-driver rounds and was already veering away from the fight. With only a moment’s hesitation, the remaining destroyers emulated their fearful sister and broke off the engagement.

  Or they would have if Brad had allowed it.

  “Fire on them,” he ordered. “Add two of our torpedoes to Honor’s fire to help make up for their damage.”

  This time, the other ships’ lack of evasive maneuvering took a heavier toll. The ship that Oath fired six torpedoes at stopped only one. Well, they stopped the rest with their hull, but that blew them up.

  Law gutted their target without too much trouble. Honor must’ve been in worse shape than they’d admitted, because they missed. Or perhaps it was just bad luck.

  Brad’s precaution of firing two torpedoes at their target was only marginally effective. The enemy took out one of the torpedoes and the other only struck a glancing blow that didn’t seem to slow them down in the slightest. In fact, they put on extra speed.

  “Send Honor after that one, long enough to fire a few more salvos of mass-driver rounds, but don’t let them get distracted from the fight around the Fleet units,” Brad ordered. “We’ll need them in a few minutes. Have Law end the crippled destroyer before it gets its act together and fires on us. How long to get to Freedom and what is their condition?”

  “They’re hurt bad,” Michelle said. “And they only have one destroyer guarding their flank against those three destroyers.”

  “Take us in.”

  “The remaining Cadre ships just came out of stealth,” Narendra said. “Looks like two frigates, four destroyers, and…and a cruiser. Sir, it’s Lioness.

  “The destroyers must’ve already placed the remaining four nuke penetrators. They’re accelerating toward Ceres.”

  Here it was: the moment of truth. Mader had the drop on them and was going to come for them right now. Against all those ships and a cruiser to boot, they didn’t have a chance in hell, but he’d do what he could to end the Phoenix before he died.

  With that kind of overwhelming firepower arrayed against them, Brad wouldn’t have blamed Grant or Montgomery if they’d held their fire, but the two destroyers came out of stealth virtually under the guns of the enemy ships. One fired at the nukes with everything they had while the other engaged the enemy ships that were already turning on them.

  Moments later, Grant and Montgomery were gone, but so were the last of the nuke penetrators. His people had died, but they’d traded their lives for millions of innocent people. At this range, he couldn’t tell if the Cadre ships were seriously damaged, but they still seemed to be in fighting shape.

  It hurt him, but he knew that had he been in that situation, he’d have done the same as his people, no matter the personal cost, but their loss was a punch to the gut. Now all that was left was to play this charade out to the bitter end.

  As if mirroring his thoughts, both Honor and Law finished their targets and moved back to join Oath in racing to Freedom’s defense.

  The cruiser was now fighting alone, having lost the last of the destroyers defending her flank. There was no chance that Brad’s ships would get there in time. He knew that, but he didn’t let himself waver. They’d do what they could to save the Fleet cruiser and then turn on the new Cadre ships.

  Only Lioness and her escorts just sat there, not accelerating toward Ceres at all.

  That prompted several transmissions from the surviving Cadre destroyers, but Mader didn’t respond. He just sat there as if he were watching the last of the fight play out, watching Brad try to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

  Well, if he was going to play that game, Brad wouldn’t argue.

  “Engineering, I need more speed,” he said over the com.

  “I’m already giving you ten percent more than I should,” Mike said, pausing at the end to swear at someone else in the compartment.

  “Then give me more,” Brad said. “Freedom is going to die if we don’t get there faster.”

  “And we’ll die if our engines go critical. I’ll do what I can.”

  That turned out to be an additional few percent of speed and Brad was glad for it.

  “Time to engagement range?” he asked Narendra.

  “Ninety seconds,” she said. “Freedom doesn’t have that long.”

  That might’ve been true, but the surviving attackers lost their nerve before they managed to kill the cruiser. Seeing three mostly undamaged destroyers racing toward them with blood in their eyes was more than they could seemingly handle, especially after being hung out to dry by their leader. They broke and shot off in three different directions.

  A mistake, as Freedom proved when she promptly destroyed one of them as soon as the pressure was off.

  “Send Law and Honor after one and we’ll take the other,” Brad said grimly.

  The Vikings’ destroyers had a significant speed advantage on the enemy and blew past the crippled Fleet cruiser just as Brad’s missiles found and killed his target. He immediately ordered Oath to decelerate hard and come around to protect the cruiser.

  The Bound-class destroyers ended their target next, leaving only Lioness and her escorts to deal with. It would be a short, brutal fight that his people would lose, but if this was the day he died, he’d die well.

  Only, the Cadre ships declined the engagement. They turned away from Ceres as a unit and moved off without even sending a transmission toward their enemies. Minutes later, they were accelerating hard and obviously not coming back to finish the survivors off.

  The Ba
ttle of Ceres was over.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Freedom was a battered wreck. Brad had thought he’d understood the degree of her damage before, but as Oath of Vengeance tucked herself into a tight escort position on the cruiser’s flank, he saw he’d underestimated it.

  There were gaping holes in the big ship’s armor. Entire sections of hull just…gone. She’d started with reactive armor over basically her entire exterior, and if any of the ablative strips were left, Brad couldn’t see them.

  And yet.

  And yet she was still in the fight. She’d lost four heavy mass-driver turrets—but she still had four left. Dozens of her octobarrel gatling mass drivers were off-line, but dozens more remained. Half of her torpedo tubes were gone, but she retained over twice Oath of Vengeance’s torpedo armament.

  The Commonwealth Fleet built their cruisers tough. Freedom was a wreck, but she and her escorts had held.

  The Cadre had blinked. Brad wasn’t entirely sure why—Everlit only knew, but the remaining destroyers and half-crippled cruiser couldn’t have stopped Lioness, let alone the remaining escorts.

  “Freedom, this is Oath of Vengeance,” Xan Wong said into her microphone. “How can we assist?”

  It took a few seconds before a response made it back.

  “Oath, this is Freedom Actual,” Fields’s own voice answered them. “Good to see you’re still with us. I think we have things aboard Freedom as under control as they’re going to be, but our sensors just finally gave up the ghost.”

  The fact that Brad wasn’t even getting a video feed from the cruiser was a hint as to the level of damage she’d taken.

  “I’m about to kick all of my parasite craft out into space for search and rescue, but I don’t even have local traffic control radar. Can I get you to handle coordinating SAR? Ceres’s local space is a mess and I want to make sure we don’t lose anyone we can save.”

  “We can do that,” Brad told Fields instantly. “We lost two of our ships out here, too. Can I lean on your authority to get the locals to deploy to help out as well?” He grimaced. “While I suspect my name might be slightly less mud down there than it was yesterday, the people we need to talk to don’t want to hear from me.”

  “They’ll listen now,” Fields said flatly. “I’ll get in touch with space traffic control and let them know the situation. You’re officially under a full combat contract with Fleet now, Madrid. In fact, we need to make that retroactive to at least twenty-four hours ago. We owe you death benefits and costs, at least.”

  “Won’t bring back my dead, but I appreciate it,” Brad said grimly. “We’ll start getting our shuttles into space as well. I think I’m keeping my destroyers attached to your apron-strings for a bit. Consider it mutual security.”

  The Fleet Commodore chuckled, but it was a bitter tone.

  “I appreciate it,” he said sadly. “I’ve lost a lot of people today. I don’t know why the Cadre ran, but I don’t see a choice but to let them go.”

  “Unless you’ve got another cruiser or six in your back pocket that you didn’t mention, I don’t see us having a choice,” Brad replied. “We’ll find everyone we can, Commodore. You have my word.”

  Six hours later, the unending litany of escape pods, survivors, and prisoners was beginning to blur together for Brad. There were probably more Cadre prisoners today than in any other action with them to date, but price…the price was far too high.

  Grant and Montgomery were gone. They’d engaged a cruiser at point-blank range, and their focus had been on saving Ceres, not themselves. There were no survivors from Brad’s two lost ships.

  Most of Fleet had been luckier, but that was a relative thing. Brad wasn’t sure where their butcher’s bill was going to end up, but they’d pulled something like five hundred Fleet personnel out of the debris.

  If he’d only been looking at destroyer crews, that would have been half of the crews…but there’d been another four hundred Fleet officers and spacers on the space station, plus almost three thousand civilians.

  There were a lot of names added to the list Brad owed the Phoenix today.

  “Suit oxygen would have run out twenty minutes ago,” Michelle said quietly. “Anyone who didn’t make it to an escape pod is gone.”

  He nodded with a grunt. His people hadn’t launched pods. They hadn’t found any drifting Dutchmen, either.

  “I hope that the locals appreciate what we did,” he said hoarsely. “And what it cost us.”

  “We’ll see,” his wife replied. “If they don’t, I think Commodore Fields will make sure they change their minds.”

  Oath of Vengeance still orbited beside Freedom, barely a kilometer clear of the bigger ship’s starboard flank. Bound by Law and Bound by Honor made up the other corners of a triangle around the Fleet vessel. Honor was short a heavy turret, but his gunships were still a potent shield against future trouble.

  “What about the nukes?” Brad asked.

  “Locals have dialed in the debris from the penetrators and are tracking crash locations,” she said. “None are looking particularly critical. Piazzi is going to get an ugly shower of radioactive isotopes, but nothing that will penetrate the dome.”

  “Thank Everlit. We did it.”

  “Yeah. We did.” Michelle leaned her head on his shoulder. They tried to avoid public displays of affection on duty, but no one was going to say anything today.

  “We’re still running traffic control for over a hundred shuttles,” he told her. “We’re looking for pods and large chunks of debris now. That’s…well, that’s the easier part of this.”

  The hard part was looking for Dutchmen, loose suits like how he’d very nearly died once.

  “We’ll find everyone we can. The Phoenix doesn’t get more victories than he earned,” Michelle said fiercely.

  “Agreed.” Brad shook his head. “I’m looking forward to the interrogation reports from the prisoners, too. They’re going to have a lot of data for us, but I’ll admit I only have one real pressing question.”

  “Why they withdrew,” his wife said with a nod.

  “Mader handed us victory from the jaws of defeat. We probably would have beaten the crap out of Lioness, but he’d have taken us. Pulling out like that, abandoning his own people…”

  Brad shook his head again, trying to clear the cobwebs.

  “And with what we heard on Kobayashi? I feel like it adds up, somehow. There was a plan here…and I’m not sure it had anything to do with actually taking Ceres.”

  “I’ve got new engines on our scans,” Lewin reported later that day.

  She sounded tired. They were. Brad wasn’t even sure when he’d last slept—or when he planned to next. A new threat, though…that could be bad.

  “Where are they coming from?”

  “Looks like Kobayashi Station,” she told him after running some numbers. “Wait—the lead ship is Horatio.”

  “We are receiving a transmission from Captain Suzuki,” Xan added as Lewin stopped. “Shall I put it on?”

  “Of course,” Brad ordered. He wiped his repeater screens of their current displays and turned his attention to the main screen.

  Suzuki was a broad-shouldered man with near-black skin and pronounced folds to his eyes. Even among Brad’s ex-Fleet officers, he was a rarity: an Earth native, born somewhere in China, Brad believed.

  “Commodore Madrid, we are en route to provide assistance at Ceres,” he said calmly. “We were relieved at Kobayashi by Fleet elements with an Agency warrant. I don’t want to discuss further details on an open channel.

  “Upon hearing the reports from Ceres, Commodore Boerefijn detached a significant portion of his forces to head to Ceres with us,” he continued. “I have Horatio herself, two Fleet destroyers, and a dozen corvettes and frigates. I make it six hours until we are in position to assist.”

  Brad breathed a sigh of relief and activated a two-way channel.

  “You had me worried, Captain,” he told Suzuki. “We weren’t ex
pecting you back anytime soon.”

  With the problems on Ceres, even an Agency warrant didn’t mean that Kobayashi was still in friendly hands, but there was nothing Suzuki could have done in the face of it—especially if this Commodore Boerefijn had enough ships to detach fourteen of them to relieve Ceres.

  “The extra ships and hands will be more than welcome,” he continued. “The situation here is a mess. It’s as under control as it’s going to get anytime soon, but…” He shrugged. “Like I said, more than welcome.”

  “That’s what both Boerefijn and I presumed,” Suzuki told him. “I’ll need an in-person meeting with you as soon as we make it to Ceres. We learned more before we left—things I think you need to know.”

  “I may have to go fall over before then,” Brad admitted, “but I’ll make sure we’re ready when you get here.”

  There was only one thing Suzuki could have learned that would have been that important. His subordinate knew where the Cadre had taken Agent Falcone.

  The channel cut off and Brad leaned back in his chair, exhaling slowly.

  “You need to go sleep,” his wife told him. He jumped. He’d sent her to go nap after their last conversation, and that had only been a couple of hours before.

  “And you don’t?” he asked dryly, turning to look over at her. She was still clearly tired, with her hair in a ragged ponytail and bags under her eyes.

  She was still gorgeous. He was probably biased.

  “I woke up again,” Michelle admitted with a grin. “Look, we both need a solid twelve hours of sleep, but if you need to talk to Suzuki in six hours, you need to be as ready as you can be. Go sleep. Narendra and I will hold down the bridge.”

  “Okay,” Brad conceded. Rising from his chair, he looked around his bridge and grinned. “In that case, I see at least half a dozen other people who should go get some rest too, don’t you, my dear XO?”

  Chapter Thirty