A King Word And a Gun

by Yuri Hamaganov

  The three Bolsheviks won’t have time to return aboard the cruiser and will fight on New Louisiana. Elena takes the wounded to the shelter, Boris joins the Lieutenant's engineering team, and Olga takes the free post of the operator, directly connected to the defensive system.

  New Louisiana's electronic warfare systems, with which Riley inflicted considerable damage to the Bolshevik, are now fully in her possession, and she is eager to test them out in real battle. Joseph, in her absence, commands the Buran, and the combined power of two experienced specialists will be a serious argument against the invaders.

  For a short time, silence reigns—the guns are silent, the air is clear, and the pirates continue their flight.

  “By the foes of the working people—fire!”

  The recoil of heavy guns rolls over the huge colony. Severov takes control of all the guns, firing at both enemy squadrons simultaneously. They are still far away, and achieving a direct hit will be extremely difficult, even for the Commander. But his fire will cause the enemy to disperse their battle formation and delay entering the firing range; there will be no lightning attack.

  The first response shots sound; the fire isn’t as dense as Olga expected—enemy artillerymen begin cautious firing, carefully aiming and saving shells. The sergeant attacks the shells coming to New Louisiana with a series of high-frequency impacts. Riley burns down a few light bombs in the void, and after a few seconds, new ones explode in their place.

  The cautiousness of the enemies is understandable; it’s clear why they are saving their ammunition and still haven’t brought down a flurry of fire on the colony—they still don’t see main enemy. Approaching close to the colony, the Bolshevik has disappeared from view, hidden from both visual sight and radar.

  Knowing that the cruiser never left New Louisiana, the pirates try several times to spot it, sending out unmanned reconnaissance, but Riley meets them with long-distance laser shots. The Bolshevik’s position remains unknown, and this worries the pirate admiral most of all. Anastasia locates an active radio exchange between the flagship and the Tartar’s lunar base; the admiral requests urgent instructions. Most likely, the answer is an order to continue the attack, and the raiders intensify the shelling. The plan is simple—threatens the colony, forcing Klimov to reveal his position, and engage in an open fight.

  There’s another bright flash, but this isn’t an illuminating bomb; Severov has again confirmed his unsurpassed skill, inserting a shell into the torpedo-bearer at a distance of five thousand kilometers. Having lost the ship, the pirates seem to break off the chain, and sixteen Morgan class raiders open fire simultaneously. Olga notices the coherence of their artillerymen, who have arranged a real fire raid on New Louisiana. All is true—the colony will belong to them or will be destroyed.

  The silence is over; it has been broken by a synchronous roar of jammers, which has created a protective shaft of interference around the station. The enemy doesn’t stay aside; Olga and Joseph exchange high-frequency strikes with pirate operators, without much effect.

  “Turn right thirty degrees!” Klimov commands, and Olga feels the mighty engines of orbit correction come to life—Riley turns a giant cylinder, cutting the target area by more than ten times. Turning around the transverse axis will burn a huge amount of fuel, and such a maneuver can’t be repeated, but now the turn will give New Louisiana the opportunity to escape from the many rushing shells, again forcing the enemy units to change their firing position.

  As soon as the engines are silent and Riley confirms the execution of the maneuver, Voronov throws overboard the first hastily made batch of traps. Tiny inflatable cylinders with inert gas fly away, shielding the cylinder from the shells. This protection is useless for a maneuvering cruiser, but for a huge colony, it will be effective.

  Laser guns, false targets, active maneuvers, and interference achieve their goal—the pirates don’t get any direct hits, and soon the raiders cease fire. Two seconds later, Anastasia fixes the synchronous start of the engines; without success from afar, the pirates begin to approach closer. The New Louisiana artillery batteries keep silent—Riley saves the shells, slowly reproducing their stock in the factory.

  “Incoming!”

  This time, the enemy gunners have no orders to save ammunition, and the combined firepower of sixteen attacking ships is crushing. Olga can’t recall artillery shelling of such force. The shooting range grows shorter with every second, leaving the defenders less time for interception. Lasers hit point-blank, and new false targets fly overboard instead of being destroyed, but it’s impossible to intercept all the shells, and now, about a kilometer from Olga's compartment, the first of them pierces the main building.

  The girl feels the impact with her whole body. The energy of the explosion permeates the whole structure of the colony. The pirate’s explosives are excellent military models, warheads specially created for the destruction of space stations. And it causes a lot of destruction, turning a cozy English town into brick dust. Emergency repairs don’t make sense; after a few seconds, three more shells explode nearby. Numerous network breaks have created a breach in the defensive belt, but now that’s not the main thing concern.

  “Sergeant, cover us!”

  Olga concentrates her efforts in the central sector, creating a blind spot eighteen kilometers away from New Louisiana. The Bolshevik forces the engines and, for a few seconds, breaks into a blind spot, gives two volleys, and again disappears into the shadow. At the same time, all the guns of New Louisiana open fire on the second squadron. Riley received Severov's strict order not to disperse the fire, concentrating all the firepower on the two head raiders. Voronov covers the flight of the shells with white noise and blinding searchlights, now the advantage of a small distance on their side.

  One of the raiders is destroyed by a direct hit from Marshal Rokossovsky. Riley seriously injures another one with a nearby explosion, and now the pirate vessel quickly loses speed, most likely already abandoned by the crew. The rest of the pirate warships don’t suffer losses, instead leaving the line of fire with a series of maneuvers. But their reciprocal fire becomes much less precise; jerking from side to side brought down the sights.

  “Flash to the right!”

  For a moment, a new sun rises ten kilometers on the starboard side, small, but dazzlingly bright and hot. The pirate flagship shot at New Louisiana with a tactical nuclear charge. Riley managed to hit the projectile with a laser, not allowing a direct hit, but it’s impossible to stop the explosion.

  The crushing blast wave can’t rise in the vacuum, but the impact of X-ray and gamma radiation is no less dangerous, despite the powerful protection of the station. The strongest induced currents, caused by the flow of charged particles, rush like a wild fire on the external lines of communication, burning and breaking absolutely everything that gets in the way. Located in the center of the nervous web and having raised a barrier in the way of the nuclear fire, Olga assumes the main impact of the electromagnetic pulse. For a brief moment, the girl loses touch with her companions, stunned and blinded by the rapidly changing current impulse that is transmitted to her brain through the Matrix, breaking through multistage absorbing filters. Many years ago, Electra Donovan nearly killed her with such a blow, but now Olga is much stronger and more experienced. She can survive the attack, instantly regaining efficiency and continuing to fight. There will be a long treatment that will follow, but for now, they must continue to shoot; the pirates may have other nuclear shells.

  “Hold on, comrades, the Red Dawn army is coming!”

  Having recovered slightly after the nuclear attack and restoring the connection, Olga is surprised to realize that the massive shelling has ceased. The enemy squadrons have left their positions, leaving behind two abandoned raiders and the debris of the third. The distance is already too great for the exchange of shots; the pirates are no longer pursuing them.

  “What happened?!”

  “Our folks entered the city!”

  Comr
ade Andrei welcomes the appearance on the horizon of a large squadron of the Red Dawn. After seeing the ships of the Queen, the pirates decided to retreat, maintaining their battle formation. Anastasia intercepted Tartar's radiogram to the squadron commander—they were ordered to leave without getting involved in the fight; Boddicker admitted a temporary defeat.

  ***

  Three hundred and ninety-two minutes later, the reanimation capsule releases Olga from a cozy bed. She doesn’t want to wake up; the course of urgent rehabilitation provided the girl with a rare six hours of total shutdown, when no single external signal could reach her consciousness. Accustomed for many years to a constant information flow, the brain is left to itself, like Robinson without Friday on an uninhabited island.

  The last time a complete shutdown happened to her was in a prison cell, and there the long absence of the Matrix upset Olga, but now she welcomes the short-term absence of external stimuli. The girl's mind needed a break after a hard fight that nearly cost her life, and she gets a well-deserved rest, having slept for six and a half hours, worrying about nothing, not doing any work, and not seeing any dreams.

  For Olga, whose consciousness is calibrated to millionths of a second and habitually to life in the center of the information flow, those 390 minutes seemed like centuries of pleasant dark emptiness. But now the emptiness begins to fill up—the resuscitation capsule completes the restoration of the burnt nerve cells, and Riley gives the command to wake Olga, gradually restoring her connection with the Matrix. During her absence in New Louisiana, a lot of interesting things happened.

  “Good morning.”

  Rapid changes meet her immediately on the way out of the capsule. When the ship's doctor sent Olga to intensive care in a large, well-equipped hospital, there were only four of Andrei's paratroopers, who were injured in a recent battle. And now all the resuscitation capsules are already filled, and dozens of other patients are undergoing urgent treatment under the supervision of medical robots. There are men, women, and children—old space vagabonds, although there are a few of Andrei’s colleagues among them. Olga sees only three silent teenagers in black caps with a red star on their sleeves, who greet the sergeant with a short nod. Now the children of the Queen recognize her.

  The main building of New Louisiana accelerated the rotation; accelerating the cylinder, Riley supports the standard for most colonies—0.5G. And behind the airlock chamber, Olga meets clean air, heated to sixteen degrees, although for several hours, vacuum and cold reigned everywhere. The abandoned and half-destroyed station is beginning to be rebuilt; on New Louisiana the morning of the first day of a new era.

  Learning about the approach of a large Red Dawn squadron, Boddicker decided not to get involved in the fight and ordered his admiral to retreat. The help arrived in time; the defenders of New Louisiana couldn’t have defended the colony alone in conditions of nuclear shelling. Faced with serious resistance, the pirates rejected all previous prohibitions, openly using nuclear weapons, intending to destroy the station since it had been captured by the enemy. The first close explosion seriously damaged Riley’s defensive systems, blinded the radar and burned down the sights, also inflicting serious injuries to Olga with an electromagnetic impulse. The girl feels that she was lucky that it was an ordinary nuclear charge, which should explode inside the station, rather than a beryllium isotope warhead, whose fast neutrons would surely have killed her.

  Despite the knockout, Olga and her comrades were ready to continue the fight, but the pirates preferred not to get involved and retreated without spending the rest of the nuclear shells on New Louisiana. The meaning of this decision would become clear for Olga after the completion of her resuscitation; now, she is just happy that her brain and nervous system weren’t burnt by a nuclear flame. The only thing that is clouding the joy is the successful escape of Gauleiter Malena Madrigal in a personal rescue capsule during the general chaos. Most likely, she will manage to get to the nearest possessions of Tartar, and Olga remains hoping that the Fuhrer will execute her for surrendering the fortress, although something tells the sergeant that this won’t be her last meeting with the Gauleiter.

  By moving her fleet into battle and forcing the pirates to retreat from New Louisiana, Elizabeth most likely saved her life. And that was just the beginning.

  After leaving the hospital, once again connected to the Matrix, and updating her data, Olga can appreciate the scale of events that once and for all changed the Free Zone. During those few hours that she spent in a dark emptiness, the Wasp Queen changed the alignment of forces throughout the vast extent of the near-Earth space. Undeclared guerrilla warfare and covert operations are over; the Space Reich has now been openly challenged.

  Olga didn’t know all the details of the forthcoming operation. None of the Bolsheviks knew, not even Klimov, a long-time ally of Elizabeth. At the captain's council, shortly before the war, they agreed that the Red Dawn would allocate a landing force for the assault of New Louisiana and then support the Bolsheviks with fire when the cruiser entered into battle.

  Klimov and his crew coped with the task perfectly. They seized the large military base of the Reich and, having defeated its garrison, the Bolsheviks caused themselves to come under fire, forcing Boddicker to immediately stop the previous operations and throw all his forces in the surrounding sectors against them.

  Waiting for the pirates to leave their bases and go to New Louisiana, Elizabeth began the offensive. Leaving the shelters, the Red Dawn Navy entered the operational space to attack the enemy throughout the entire Free Zone.

  As it had been decided at the council, the Queen supported the Bolsheviks on New Louisiana after they skillfully distracted the enemy’s attention, allowing her to deal the first blows. But Elizabeth has no plans to limit her success, and once again returning to the Matrix, Voronov is amazed at the fury of the flared conflict, the flame of which has swept the entire space. Such large-scale military clashes outside the Earth haven’t been seen for more than three decades, since the end of the First Space War. The powerful fleets of the Supernova Corporation and the Union declared neutrality without ever leaving their military bases, and only long-range radars and spy robots silently watch the duel of a once-small pirate gang and a squad of mercenaries, whose battle now resembles a battle between two full-fledged armies.

  For the year that Grond reigned on Earth, the fleet and the army of Boddicker carried out many successful offensive operations in the near and far space, capturing hundreds of ships and plundering dozens of colonies. It happened that they were given serious resistance; Bolshevik repulsed several such attacks. But a large-scale attack on the Reich itself and his allies hasn’t happened yet, and now, for the first time, the pirates must not attack but must instead defend themselves against the hail of blows that struck the Tartar Empire from all sides.

  Loaded with gravel and released into the void many weeks ago, the assault barges complete their flight with titanic blows, ramming the far-reaching outposts of Tartar and knocking them off their orbits. Minefields, sown on old pirate roads, are waiting for enemy units. The Dawn warships, having dropped their masks of old slow-moving trucks, hunt for enemy raiders and supply vehicles.

  A hail of bombs rains against the Reich's allies; the Wasp Queen has announced a general cleansing, getting rid of the criminal element. New Vegas is completely destroyed by a nuclear strike. Sicily-2, West Shinjuku, the Golden Serpent, Four-Leaf, East End, Haifa-5, Kosovo-3, MS-17, and many other thieves’ dens have been boarded and now are blazing in the void with fires.

  Frying Pan, Oven, Moon, Mars, Asteroid Belt, Galilean Moons—everywhere, there are reports of new liquidations of known bandits and their accomplices. The Queen's operatives have even reached Neptune. The most serious blow was struck at Freeport, whose central blocks were destroyed by shelling from the orbit; Olga sees huge breaks in the ceilings over the Riley Reed Boulevard and the reflections of fires in the Citadel.

  After being attacked for the first time, and h
aving suffered heavy losses, Boddicker quickly recovers and launches a counterattack. Here and there, battles break out between single ships and small detachments, but this is clearly not enough for a decisive answer, so the main blow is dealt in the colonies. But here, the pirates face certain difficulties—it isn’t clear where and at whom to shoot.

  Unlike the Space Reich, the Wasp Queen doesn’t have permanent bases. Her fleet has always acted on a nomadic principle, appearing and disappearing in the void without a clear binding to a certain area. Boddicker solved this problem simply by giving orders to burn down a dozen large colonies in the Free Zone, whose population was suspected of supporting the Red Dawn. A couple of attacks were repulsed, but other attacks on overcrowded, helpless colonies were crowned with success. According to Uncle Joe’s estimates, more than a hundred thousand people died during the punitive operations in the last ten hours. The meaning of the punitive raids clear at a glance; they want to call the Queen's forces to an open battle.

  But all this is happening right now in other parts of the world, at hundreds of thousands and millions of kilometers away. And here, in New Louisiana, where a fierce battle was recently held, as if in the eye of a storm, is silence, and only refugee transports are moored one by one. After leaving the hospital and going on the axial deck, Olga meets hundreds of strangers who are populating the giant colony. Almost immediately, her first task comes—Chernova needs her help with the restoration of hydroponic greenhouses, which must be started at full capacity as soon as possible. They have to work hard; a new war is just beginning.