“We will find these bastards,” he said grimly.
“If you find them for me, Admiral, I will blow them to hell for you,” Kyle replied.
#
They’d collected full intelligence dumps from each of the star systems they’d passed through, and Serengeti and Antioch, at least, were continuing to update Kodiak with new information as they acquired it.
Kyle wasn’t a data analyst by training and had left the work to CIC and Nebula, but there were aspects of it he did feel qualified to look over—mostly, trying to backtrack the exit and arrival vectors of the various pirate forces.
He had drawn them all onto a holographic representation of local space hovering above his desk, hoping to find at least some overlaps, some central point that would give them a target.
Of course, if it was that easy, the locals would have done it years before. There were overlaps, but they were of two or three courses at most, and there were nine of them, all in deep space. He wasn’t surprised that Coati, a former military professional, had been too smart to make it that easy.
The lack of useful information was frustrating, though. Studying the vectors, there was information Kyle could interpolate, but it wasn’t useful information. He could, for example, be certain that the pirates were dropping out of FTL some distance from the target systems and changing course.
He was also reasonably sure that there were at least two bases in play, and if he’d been coordinating the campaign, he’d have staging bases as intermediaries to protect the actual shipyard.
For a theoretically crazed pirate, this “Commodore Coati” was far too damned professional for Kyle’s liking.
“Sir,” Jamison interrupted his contemplation. “We have a q-com connection for you from Napoleon.”
“Napoleon, Commander?” he asked. Another of the Conqueror-class ships; he thought she was assigned to Seventh Fleet, but he didn’t know anyone aboard her.
“It’s Captain Solace, sir,” his coms officer told him after a moment. “The connection is live.”
Mira contacting him from a ship other than Camerone was a bad sign.
“Put her through,” he ordered, sending the hologram of the region away with a gesture and linking the channel to the big wallscreen.
His girlfriend looked shattered. Kyle had seen Mira tired, he’d seen her as an emotionless statute who didn’t trust him…but he’d never seen her heartbroken and wavering even while sitting down.
“Mira, what happened?” he asked, before even considering that she might be able to tell him.
“Kyle,” she replied, closing her eyes and breathing deeply. “Thank you. I…needed to see you. To know you were okay, at least.”
“What happened?” he asked again. “I was briefed on the Via Somnia op…”
She exhaled and nodded.
“For the first time ever, a Commonwealth star system has been occupied by a foreign power,” she told him in a leaden voice. “Via Somnia fell two days ago. The price was…high.”
If the battle had been over for almost two days, the official loss announcements would be going out soon. From Mira’s state, though, he could guess at least one.
“Miriam is dead,” she told him softly and he winced. Vice Admiral Miriam Alstairs had been in command of Seventh Fleet, and Mira’s ship had been her flagship. “Camerone was at the center of a fighter strike. We lost Zheng He, Grizzly, and Horus in ten minutes. Camerone survived, but we took too many hits. Flag deck was gone. We ejected half our damn zero-point cells.”
“Gods,” he murmured. He’d known the Captains and many of the officers of all three of the ships lost.
“Stars alone know how she made it through,” Mira continued. “But we survived the battle. Shattered their defenses, landed troops on the station. More reinforcements are on the way, including Avalon and Kronos.”
Kyle managed to not wince at the realization that Avalon would be going back into action with a different captain. The surprise that Kronos, one of only two Titan-class battleships built with the new-generation hulls, was actually leaving the Castle system helped.
“Camerone isn’t salvageable,” the battlecruiser’s captain said softly. “She’ll be destroyed in place; she isn’t even worth taking home for scrap. I lost half my crew to the Void, Kyle. I’m…” She swallowed. “I’ve been ordered to return to Castle for mandatory psych assessment and reassignment.”
“You lost your ship,” he reminded her. “That assessment is necessary, love. They’re not going to ground you.”
“We’ll see,” Mira half-whispered. “I lost the Admiral, Kyle.”
“And saved half your crew. You know which Miriam would have wanted,” he pointed out.
She choked down a sob and nodded. If Kyle had ever doubted that she trusted him, that she let him see her like this would have told him all he needed to know.
With that much damage to Camerone, he’d come perilously close to losing Mira, a thought that sent shivers of fear down his own spine, and he reached out to touch her face on the screen. The gesture earned him a strained smile, which he returned in full force.
“Trust the Fleet,” he told her. “They’ve been through this before, they know the drill, they’ve a good idea of what you need.”
At least with the ship being written off after a major battle, crippled facing the enemy with all guns blazing, there would be no need for a Board or other inquiry. Mira would get a new command, though; if JD-Personnel was as smart as he expected and he managed to deal with Coati in a “timely” manner, she’d likely still be on Castle when he returned.
“I do,” Mira told him. “I do.” She sighed deeply. “It’s…not easy to lose a ship.”
“No,” he agreed. “So, listen to your doctors, my love,” he ordered. “I don’t know when I’ll be back, but I’ll be in touch as I can.”
“I know,” she said with an only somewhat-forced smile. “I needed to see you. Thank you.”
“I’m fine,” he told her with a grin. “The poor pirates out here, well, they’re learning the errors of their ways.”
Even more so than before, though, he desperately wanted a target he could hit to crush the pirates so he could take his people home.
#
Chapter 37
Deep Space Two Light-years From KDX-6657 System
20:00 November 23, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
Terran Commonwealth Marine Corps Assault Transport Stormcloud
Stormcloud’s main briefing area was designed to hold all the officers of a four-thousand-Marine assault brigade. Even with Chariot’s entire senior staff linked in by virtual conference, it seemed empty with just the senior officers of James Tecumseh’s Task Group.
“Stormcloud is fucked,” Commander Isaac Arsenault, the assault transport’s chief engineer, told the gathering flatly. “We’ve almost no fuel, no weapons, nothing. Our stabilizer array is badly damaged, and I’m stunned we managed to sustain a warp bubble as long as we did.”
“Is it repairable?” James asked.
“We’d have to cannibalize Chariot’s arrays,” Commander Jillian Connor, Chariot’s chief engineer, told him. “Or get one or both ships to a system with an asteroid belt we can rip apart for resources. Out here?” The holographic projection of the petite engineer, which somehow perfectly reflected the grease stain on her face, shook its head.
“Chariot can fly and fight, but we don’t have the life support to take on Colonel Barbados’s Marines, let alone Stormcloud’s crew and Poseidon’s survivors,” she continued.
“Life support is about all we’ve got left,” Arsenault said bluntly. “I wouldn’t want to risk even a short hop without replacing most of our stabilizer emitters, and we don’t have the parts.”
James sighed, carefully shifting the heavy weight of his new cybernetic limbs to try and find some comfort.
“I hesitate to rip apart our one functioning warship to rebuild an effectively unarmed ship, but I understand your point,” he told them.
“What alternative do we have?”
The engineers shared a glance.
“Depends on what you want us to do, sir,” Connor finally said. “Stormcloud can easily carry all of our personnel back to the Commonwealth, and Chariot, much as I love her, is more expendable than the crew aboard.”
“Can we get Stormcloud fitted for a journey back and keep Chariot at all FTL-capable?” James asked.
Arsenault looked to Connor, then shrugged.
“We have some spares between us,” he admitted. “We could get Stormcloud fitted out for the journey home and keep Chariot somewhat functional, but…”
“We’d probably be able to hold the stabilizer fields together for about five days,” Connor said flatly. “That’s a seven-light-year range. More might be possible, but I wouldn’t want to risk it.”
“The only things inside seven light-years are KDX, Antioch and Istanbul,” Modesitt pointed out. “All of those are hostile now and, well…”
“Intel says that Roberts is leaving Antioch for Istanbul in two days,” James agreed. “We’re not going to have much of a chance to repair and refit with a pair of Alliance warships in the system.”
“We can’t fight Poseidon, sir,” Chariot’s CO pointed out. “We had a small chance before, but now…she’s twice our size and has the lances and missile launchers to match. If Petrovsky has her fully online, we can’t fight her.”
“They’ve disabled her q-coms,” James told the others. “Likely, they’ve physically destroyed the entangled blocks to make sure we couldn’t use any back doors to disable her. We have no data on her status, but given the skill their hackers already demonstrated, I would assume she is either fully online or will be within a day or two.
“Which means that a two-bit pirate psychopath now has one of Terra’s most powerful battlecruisers.”
He let that sink in, glancing around the room at his subordinates.
“Our mission was to draw Alliance forces out here, sir,” Barbados pointed out slowly. “Much as I hate to say it, Coati having Poseidon means, well, we’ve achieved that mission. I hate the bastard, but he’s damned good at what he does. He’s going to give Roberts a run for his money and they’ll need to send him reinforcements.”
“That’s one way to look at it,” James agreed, hopefully not obviously unwillingly, “but there’s another side to this we need to consider. Commander Arsenault, Commander Connor: given the demonstrated ability of Coati’s hackers and Petrovsky’s XO overrides, how much of Poseidon’s confidential and technical files do you think he’ll be able to carve out for sale?”
He could see the sick look spread through his crew as the consequences sank home. The confidential files were bad enough. There was nothing truly damning or destructive in there, but he was certain the Alliance or the League could do a lot with the battlecruiser’s copies of security codes and contingency plans, even though all of that changed regularly.
The technical files, though, included enough details that any half-decent yard would be able to duplicate Poseidon. And while James wasn’t aware of any glaring hidden vulnerabilities to the cruiser’s design, the Alliance would be certain to find something of value.
Something that would result in the deaths of their comrades.
“A lot,” Connor finally replied. “Best-case scenario…given his demonstrated resources, he’ll be able to produce crude but effective knockoffs of the Katana, same as he was doing with the Federation Cobras. Worst-case…”
“It’s entirely possible he could produce a crude but effective knockoff of the Hercules-class battlecruiser,” Arsenault finished the sentence for her. “Would take two, maybe three years. But nobody knows where his main base and shipyard are, and if he can build those damn corsairs, a Hercules is probably within his capabilities.”
“That’s what I was afraid of,” James said. “He could lose Poseidon to the Alliance and still come back in five years and conquer this entire sector, creating a pocket empire we would have to suppress to make the Rimward Marches safe after their annexation.”
He half-expected his subordinates to object, to challenge the argument. Only silence answered him.
“I don’t believe,” he continued after a moment, “that we can permit that to happen. That any naval officer worthy of their uniform could permit that to happen.”
“Sir, we’ve already established that Chariot can’t fight Poseidon,” Modesitt pointed out. “Regardless of what we may want to permit, we can’t stop him.”
“We don’t have the firepower,” he agreed. “But there is a force here that does. A force that wants Coati as badly or worse than we do—and one that, once combined with Chariot, has more than enough firepower to take him down.”
“The Alliance,” Colton said aloud. “We can’t work with the Alliance to destroy one of our own ships!”
“Why not?” James asked. “At this point, Captain Colton, we and Captain Roberts share an objective: the destruction of Poseidon and the elimination of Coati and his industrial base. They don’t know where Coati is based, but we at least know about the KDX base.”
He looked around.
“I will be honest, people. Every argument I have made is true and correct, but even if they weren’t, I would be considering this. Commodore Coati murdered over three thousand Commonwealth personnel, most of the crew of a battlecruiser.
“I cannot—I will not—permit that to stand unpunished. Anyone who wants to remain will be covered by my orders, but anyone who is unwilling to commit to this can be transferred to Stormcloud untainted by my…actions.”
Mutiny, after all, was such an ugly word.
“One condition, sir,” Barbados told him.
“Conditions, Colonel?” James asked dryly.
“Just one, sir, and I’ll have a battalion worth of volunteers ready to squeeze into wherever Chariot can put us,” the Marine replied. “We kill Coati. No negotiations. No compromises. The son of a bitch swings.”
“Yes,” the Commodore said flatly. “I can promise that.”
“Then I’m in,” Modesitt told him. “I went through the academy with Daryush. He didn’t deserve that. Petrovsky needs to swing alongside Coati.”
“I am planning on vaporizing them,” James pointed out. “There won’t be any hangings.”
“It’ll do.”
“So, what, we’re going to trust the Alliance to refit Chariot’s stabilizers?” Connor demanded.
“Or at least to let us rip apart an asteroid in Istanbul,” he confirmed. “There’s not much choice, not if we want to send Stormcloud home.”
She shook her head.
“This is insane. I’m out.”
“I’m in,” Arsenault said in immediate reply. “Want to switch places, Jessica?”
“If you want to write off your career, go ahead,” she told him.
“I had friends in the boarding teams,” he said flatly. “Too many didn’t come back from Poseidon for me to walk away.”
“Whatever needs to be done,” James told them. “How long until both ships can fly?”
“Two, three days,” Arsenault replied. “We’ll have Chariot in Istanbul on December first, no problem.”
“Make sure your crews and Marines know they can switch over to Stormcloud,” the Commodore insisted. “With the survivors from Poseidon, I’m sure we can get enough to fight Chariot. I don’t want anyone on this who doesn’t want to be here.”
#
Chapter 38
Istanbul System
08:00 November 29, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
DSC-052 Kodiak
The trip from Antioch to Istanbul had been quiet and calm. The freighters and warships had fallen into a rhythm now, with ten of the civilian ships following along with Kodiak and Thoth like well-behaved sheep.
Once again, Thoth led the way into the system, followed by Kodiak. The two warships tried to link in to the system sensor network, to make sure that Constantinople Control wasn’t aware of any threats that t
hey needed to keep an eye out for…but the tactical feeds didn’t update.
“Sir,” Jamison called Kyle over to her, the Lieutenant Commander’s voice worried. “Constantinople Control isn’t responding to q-com contact.”
“Is the link broken?” he asked. If the entangled blocks linking Antioch to Castle or Constantinople Control to Antioch were damaged or destroyed, they wouldn’t get through, and that would be an entirely different order of worries.
“No, I’m getting system responses confirming an active connection,” Jamison replied. “There’s just… nobody picking up.”
“Houshian, what’s our ETA?”
“Sixty seconds and counting,” his navigator confirmed. “Thoth is in-system.”
“Sterling, get me Thoth’s sensor feeds,” Kyle ordered. He paused, looking around his bridge. He had his Alpha Shift on deck, half his senior officers and the most experienced NCOs, but…
“And take us to battle stations,” he concluded. “Something is not right.”
Silent alerts flashed throughout the bridge, and his implant informed him that the rest of the crew was getting the audio and implant alerts that would have them to their stations in under three minutes.
It wouldn’t get everyone on station by the time they emerged, but the fact that they had an active link to Thoth suggested there was no immediate threat.
“Data is feeding from Thoth,” Sterling confirmed. “Captain von Lambert has also gone to battle stations.”
“Emergence in thirty seconds.”
It was still theoretically possible to abort, stabilizing the warp bubble and swerving around the star system. Getting the entire convoy to do so, however, would be all but impossible.
Kyle studied the feed from Thoth. There didn’t appear to be any immediate threats, but something was definitely wrong. The stream of ships between Constantinople and the gas giants appeared to have been cut off, all of them now headed away from the inhabited planet toward the skimmer stations that provided their cargos.
Rimward Stars (Castle Federation Book 5) Page 27
