Vicky Peterwald: Survivor (Vicky Peterwald Series Book 2)
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PRAISE FOR THE KRIS LONGKNIFE NOVELS
“A whopping good read . . . Fast-paced, exciting, nicely detailed, with some innovative touches.”
—Elizabeth Moon, Nebula Award–winning author of Crown of Renewal
“Shepherd delivers no shortage of military action, in space and on the ground. It’s cinematic, dramatic, and dynamic . . . [He also] demonstrates a knack for characterization, balancing serious moments with dry humor.”
—Tor.com
“Readers have come to depend on Mike Shepherd for fast-paced military science fiction bound to compelling story lines and adrenaline-pumping battles . . . Kris Longknife is a hero to the core.”
—Fresh Fiction
“Fans of the Honor Harrington escapades will welcome the adventures of another strong female in outer space starring in a thrill-a-page military space opera . . . The audience will root for the determined, courageous, and endearing heroine as she displays intelligence and leadership during lethal confrontations.”
—Alternative Worlds
“Mike Shepherd has written an action-packed, exciting space opera that starts at light speed and just keeps getting better. This is outer-space military science fiction at its adventurous best.”
—Midwest Book Review
“I always look forward to installments in the Kris Longknife series because I know I’m guaranteed a good time with plenty of adventure . . . Military SF fans are bound to get a kick out of the series as a whole.”
—SF Site
Ace Books by Mike Shepherd
KRIS LONGKNIFE: MUTINEER
KRIS LONGKNIFE: DESERTER
KRIS LONGKNIFE: DEFIANT
KRIS LONGKNIFE: RESOLUTE
KRIS LONGKNIFE: AUDACIOUS
KRIS LONGKNIFE: INTREPID
KRIS LONGKNIFE: UNDAUNTED
KRIS LONGKNIFE: REDOUBTABLE
KRIS LONGKNIFE: DARING
KRIS LONGKNIFE: FURIOUS
KRIS LONGKNIFE: DEFENDER
KRIS LONGKNIFE: TENACIOUS
TO DO OR DIE: A JUMP UNIVERSE NOVEL
VICKY PETERWALD: TARGET
VICKY PETERWALD: SURVIVOR
Specials
KRIS LONGKNIFE: TRAINING DAZE
KRIS LONGKNIFE: WELCOME HOME / GO AWAY
Writing as Mike Moscoe
THE FIRST CASUALTY: A JUMP UNIVERSE NOVEL
THE PRICE OF PEACE: A JUMP UNIVERSE NOVEL
THEY ALSO SERVE: A JUMP UNIVERSE NOVEL
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014
VICKY PETERWALD: SURVIVOR
An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the author
Copyright © 2015 by Mike Moscoe.
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
ACE and the “A” design are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
For more information, visit penguin.com.
eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-61732-8
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Ace mass-market edition / June 2015
Cover illustration by Scott Grimando.
Cover design by Diana Kolsky.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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CONTENTS
Praise for Mike Shepherd
Ace Books by Mike Shepherd
Title Page
Copyright
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
CHAPTER 53
CHAPTER 54
CHAPTER 55
CHAPTER 56
CHAPTER 57
CHAPTER 58
CHAPTER 59
CHAPTER 60
CHAPTER 61
CHAPTER 62
CHAPTER 63
CHAPTER 64
CHAPTER 65
CHAPTER 66
CHAPTER 67
CHAPTER 68
About the Author
CHAPTER 1
HER Imperial Grace, the Grand Duchess, Lieutenant Commander Vicky Peterwald cinched in her five-point restraint harness as tight as she could. Beside her, the man sworn to protect her life with his own, Commander Gerrit Schlieffen, did the same. Only then did he begin to activate the myriad of controls and systems of the loaned shuttle.
Vicky was careful not to touch anything.
Kris Longknife could probably land the shuttle herself from orbit, while dodging lasers all the way down. Vicky winced; she’d been raised to be traded off for some advantageous marriage by her dad, the Emperor. Her training had consisted mainly of looking pretty while learning needlepoint and the Kama Sutra for both defense and offense.
In the world she’d been raised to expect, she would be back in the passenger compartment of the shuttle, seducing her husband into the five-hundred-mile-high club.
Today, Vicky’s partner would either dodge the threatened lasers aimed at them, or both of them would die.
And Vicky couldn’t do a damn thing about it.
Then again, if they survived the next couple of hours, Vicky just might save a couple of planets in the Emperor’s crumbling Empire from economic collapse, starvation, and cannibalism.
Maybe.
If she was lucky, and could pull a political miracle out of thin air.
Too bad she had no idea how she might do that.
“You want to turn on the electronic-countermeasures suite?” Commander Schlieffen said.
Vic
ky looked at the collection of gauges, dials, and lights in front of her. Most were a duplicate of those in front of the pilot’s seat. There was a light gray panel identified as made by Singer. Vicky pointed at it.
“You mean this?”
“Yep. The admiral wasn’t kidding when he said he was giving us his most expendable shuttle. You need to warm up the ECM system if it’s going to do us any good in a few minutes.”
During her three years in the Imperial Greenfeld Navy, Vicky had learned to stand communications watches on the bridges of battleships. They usually had a couple of specialists standing the ECM watches. As a boot ensign, Vicky had rotated through one watch at the ECM station.
She hadn’t learned much.
However, as limited as her education was, she could recognize an on/off button. She pressed it. The lights on the gray board slowly flickered to life.
“That old system isn’t worth much,” the commander said, glancing from his own board. “Still, if you hold down the update button on the central screen, it might give you a tutorial.”
“Might?” Vicky said.
“Some versions did. Others were too old and too limited to store that in the system. Give it a try and see what happens.”
Vicky held the identified button down. The small central screen on the gray box began to scroll instructions. The Grand Duchess had learned to read. Today, what she read told her the system could identify threats that were in its database, prioritize them, and provide a limited amount of distraction.
“I wonder when the database was last updated?” Vicky asked.
“There should be an option in the menu for that.”
Vicky found the option and activated it.
The system went down.
She rebooted the light gray box and went to the update option again.
It went out to lunch . . . again.
The third time, it updated.
“This shuttle isn’t in very good shape,” she observed dryly.
“As the plane captain told me.”
Vicky raised an eyebrow. “This wreck has a plane captain?”
“Actually no,” the commander admitted, flipping a switch several times before the data strip above it came to life. “But a second class petty officer was told two hours ago that this wreck was his to captain. It’s in as good a shape as it is because he and the best half dozen Sailors he could lay his hands on spent their time getting it fit for a drop. He hopes.”
“I can only imagine what it must have looked like four hours ago,” Vicky said dryly.
The commander flipped a switch slowly, a half dozen times, frowned, and said, “I doubt it.”
Vicky was trying to get a report on the number of reloads of chaff the ECM system had. She’d interrogated it three times and gotten three different answers when the commander announced, “You better say any prayers you know. I’m about to activate the antimatter reactor.”
“Now I lay me down to sleep,” Vicky muttered.
“Is that the only prayer you know?”
“You may have noticed, we don’t do a lot of praying at the Imperial Palace.”
“Then I guess my ‘God help us’ will have to do.”
The commander threw a large double switch between them.
Nothing happened.
A few breathless seconds later, several strip gauges lit up, and lights began to dance up and down them.
“Is that good?” Vicky asked.
“You’re still here to ask,” the commander said. “It appears that either I, or my dear mother, still has some pull with the Big Man.”
“I suspect it’s your mother,” Vicky answered.
“No doubt.”
Together, they watched the gauges as their dance settled down to a placid wiggle in the green zones of all six strip gauges.
“I believe we’re ready to drop,” the commander said.
“I do have a meeting to attend with an old friend.”
“Assuming he doesn’t carry through with his threat to have us shot out of his sky. Do you affect all your old flames like that?”
“Most. You seem to be a nice exception to the rule.”
“Our relationship hardly has the blush off the rose,” the commander said.
“I hadn’t noticed any blushes on your part.”
“Or yours, Your Grace.”
“Shall we quit stalling and see if this contraption can get away from the station?”
“Why not? I don’t want to live forever.”
So saying, Commander Schlieffen reached above his head for the red bar with RELEASE in yellow letters and pulled it.
The shuttle did not depart the station with the grace of a falling angel. Instead, the aft tie-down released their rear to dangle. The spin of the station pressed them tight against their seats.
The commander yanked again, harder, on the release.
Reluctantly, their forward tie-down came loose. They drifted away from High St. Petersburg station with the deck canted down to the right.
“That wasn’t the best launch I ever made,” the commander observed, half to himself. “Nor was it the worst. Now, let’s go see if the mayor of Sevastopol really intends to kill us.”
CHAPTER 2
BEFORE the mayor of Sevastopol could have his go at killing them, they had to get away from the station. That proved exciting.
“Damn,” the commander said, as the shuttle began to spin. “I’ve got a stuck thruster.”
Vicky was close to graying out before the commander got the thruster off-line.
“Let’s try that again,” he said as he slowly backed them away from the station using long, low burns from the four thrusters he found trustworthy. This time, there were no surprises.
“Who’s tracking us?” he asked, as they crossed the ten-klick threshold from station control to orbital control.
“I’ve got five search radars on us,” Vicky reported crisply.
“Can that Ouija board tell you which are ground-based and might have fire-control radars slaved to them?”
“Not a clue.”
“Well, I could hope.”
“I like a man who can hope,” Vicky said.
“I have many admirable qualities,” he muttered, firing the main retro engine. “Some of them don’t even require a bed.”
“I could like the ones that don’t,” Vicky purred.
“Variety from a woman is nice,” he said, eyeing his readouts. “Consistency, however, is very appreciated from rocket engines. Ours, at least for now, appear to be demonstrating a delightful degree of reliability.”
“That can, at the proper time, be quite nice,” Vicky agreed.
Their verbal foreplay abruptly ended as the radio squawked.
“Unidentified shuttle. This is Petersburg Orbital Control. You are not authorized in our space. Return to the station.”
Commander Schlieffen glanced at his comm unit and toggled a switch. “Petersburg Orbital Control, this is shuttle November, X-ray, three four niner. I have filed a flight plan for a descent to Sevastopol Bay shuttle-landing area. I am on descent.”
“Shuttle November, X-ray, three four niner, be advised. Your flight plan was rejected. Return to station.”
Vicky glanced at Gerrit. He pulled a flimsy from his shipsuit pocket. A large header at the top of it identified it as a flight plan. Even larger print, in red letters, read REJECTED.
“Orbital Control, this is three four niner. I have an approved flight plan here. I’m on my way down.”
“Three four niner, I have a flight plan for you that was rejected. It shows a time stamp of one hour, fifty-six minutes ago. Cease your burn and return to the station.”
“Sorry, Control. Shuttle three four niner is committed to a deorbiting burn. I’ll see you in thirty minutes.”
“Shuttle November, X-ray, three four niner, be advised that Petersburg reserves control of its space to our sovereignty. I am authorized to use deadly force to protect our sovereign space.”
Gerrit glanced at Vicky. She shrugged, as much as her five-point restraining harness allowed.
“Orbital Control, I understand your politics. Be advised, I have the Grand Duchess Victoria Peterwald on board, and I am committed to descent. Again, we’ll see you in thirty minutes.”
A new voice came on the radio. “We know who you have on board, and we will see you in hell.”
The transmission ended in a determined click.
“Was that the mayor?” the commander asked.
“I think so,” Vicky said. “It’s been a while.”
“Touchy fellow, don’t you think?”
“He was much nicer the last time we met. But then, he wanted an official, Imperial-approved city charter. Give a guy what he wants, and he never calls back for a second date.”
“I’d call you back for a second date,” the commander said, helpfully, hopefully, even a bit consolingly. Vicky wasn’t quite sure which to choose from. Distraction was probably the overriding content of his answer.
The main engine was not firing smoothly.
There were coughs in the flow of reaction mass to the engines. The deorbital burn was not only uneven, it seemed to pull to the right, then left, then right again, with no particular pattern.
The commander concentrated on doing some of that nifty pilot stuff.
Vicky checked her board.
“We got fire-control radars scanning us,” she said.
“They locked on?”
“Not yet.”
“So they aren’t serious yet.”
“Apparently.”
“I hope this crazy dance we’re doing is causing them as much trouble as it’s causing me.”
Vicky left the commander to do his piloting thing and eyed her board. The fire-control radars were still in scanning mode. In a few minutes, as they began their fiery reentry, radar would become useless.
The problem was surviving until then.
One of the scanning radars locked on.
“They’ve got a lock,” she announced in a low, firm voice. Admiral Krätz would be so proud of his student.
“I’m going to initiate a bit of a turn. When I tell you, release chaff.”