A King Word And a Gun

by Yuri Hamaganov

  There should not be any such incidents in the future, especially with the advent of Grond and the beginning of the evacuation, when it became clear that the near and far colonies would soon become the only home for fugitives from Earth. In these conditions, the bosses of this world sent additional funds for the accelerated militarization of their possessions; colonies everywhere turned into fortresses, whose inhabitants were firmly convinced that they would never see pirate squadrons on their horizon, especially since Boddicker's thugs still had enough prey in the Free Zone. But these remarkable plans didn’t take into account the prospect of a civil war, when a fatal blow could be inflicted from an unexpected, unpredictable direction.

  Judging by the Navy’s intelligence, the space faction sanctioned a final solution to the problem with the Earthmen in February, when the Son of Thunder was just starting his long run. Even then, realizing the inevitability of the armed redistribution of common property, the Big Five began preparing for the operation, having planned in advance who would do what. From the very beginning, the Fuhrer and his gang were featured in these plans; the highest ranking of the space capitalists planned to entrust punitive raids to private contractors, and Boddicker was best suited for the responsibility of this work.

  According to intelligence reports, secret negotiations between Boddicker and Jenna Donovan took place in the spring—the new allies worked out a common strategy and solved technical issues. Having received from his employers complete freedom of action, unlimited material support, and a few months of handicap, Boddicker skillfully used this advantage, ready to repeat the Red December on a much greater scale.

  Grond was crashing countries and continents below, the former social structure was rapidly collapsing, and the flow of refugees was growing every day. In those conditions, no one paid any attention to ordinary citizens, who independently left their native planet in search of salvation. The main priority was to have documents and at least some money, so they could go wherever they wanted, to any colony that accepts refugees who can pay a substantially increased entrance fee. Here are some newlyweds, there is a lonely widower, there is a mother with several children—it’s impossible to track them all.

  Only Boddicker knew how many Tartar agents were in the middle of this stream. There were no orphan children or former prisoners of war bought at the slave markets; this time, the agents were usual earthlings in the recent past. Without relying on false documents, Boddicker asked Jenna for real citizens of Supernova with irreproachable files—asked and received in full. Everything was done cleanly; there were no reports of kidnapping or missing persons—nothing that could arouse suspicion among the colonists.

  As before, the hidden agents knew nothing about the experiments carried out on them, nor about the mission entrusted to them. They simply fled Earth, having received the long-awaited permission to settle in the corporation colonies far away from the Son of Thunder. Passenger ships brought them to their destination, clean documents allowed them to pass customs without any problems, and good money provided a tolerable life; more wasn’t required. All necessary changes had already been made, and repeatedly rewritten memories allowed them to hide even from themselves the loss of several very important days—the involuntary kamikaze arrived in complete confidence about their own reliability.

  To Eastwood–Gamma came five such agents: a husband, a wife, and three children, arrived from Earth in early June, two months before the war. The husband, a formerly highly qualified engineer from London, received a job in the repair crew of life support systems. The wife, for a small bribe, got a job as an operator in the docks. The children were attached to a kindergarten.

  Early in the morning of August 2, the family received a short video from one of their relatives, who reported his intention to leave the ruined England in the near future and move into orbit. At the same time, on other colonies, hundreds of other hidden agents received similar messages.

  After receiving the letter, the husband activated the implanted combat module, which grew in his body to the desired size in seventy minutes, after which he killed his partners and pumped neural-paralytic gas into the ventilation system. Meanwhile, the wife loaded into the central Matrix a deep-wired set of malicious commands and viruses that hit the control room and killed most of the shift on duty with a high-frequency pulse that burned down the carrier’s brain. The children, whose bodies had already grown powerful bombs, synchronously undermined themselves in three different compartments, causing serious damage to the defensive system of the colony. And the link of pirate raiders, who entered the Eastwood-Gamma sector under the cover of the Supernova’s military transport, was already attacking.

  The Bolsheviks could only guess the details, but the general picture was understandable. Most of the defensive system was destroyed by the suicide bombers, which together with the death of officers on duty allowed the attackers to freely enter the line of effective fire. The bombardment was concentrated and cruel; the outer decks were riddled with hundreds of high-explosive and armor-piercing shells, killing almost everyone who was there. The Eastwood-Gamma port was completely destroyed, along with the arsenals and warehouses. The station lost the ability to provide earthlings with ships, and in a normal situation, this would be enough, but Boddicker gave the order to begin boarding, despite the loss of one of his raiders from retaliatory fire. The boarding teams rushed forward, landed on the corroded outer hull, and began to move inward, methodically cleaning it deck by deck.

  Judging by the huge number of corpses found by Olga and her comrades, the attackers received a clear order to kill them all, and to kill as quickly as possible. The civil war was in full swing, and the Five Families insisted on the speedy liquidation of the leaders of the Earthmen, some of whom were hiding at Eastwood-Gamma. In addition, the indicative cruelty of punitive raids has to demonstrate to all what would happen to the enemies of space capitalists, so prisoners weren’t taken here.

  Having abandoned their standard practice of seizing civilians for further sale in the slave markets of Tartar, the pirates for a couple of hours interrupted the entire population of the colony, quickly loaded their ships with loot, and go away – the war that was gaining pace required new and immediate attacks on new targets. Eastwood-Gamma, which was shot down, burned, and clogged with corpses, drifted in the void for about a week, until the final completion of the hostilities. Judging by some characteristic traces, during this time, space trumps have come here – they never missed a chance to profit on the ruins, but they didn’t manage to loot for a long time; the pirates soon returned to the skeleton of the colony they had killed.

  Immediately after the surrender of the Earth faction, the Eastwood-Gamma ruins were bought for a nominal fee from the Big Five by the scrap metal recycling company, one of the Boddicker’s many legal firms that quickly acquired dozens of crushed and dead stations. Having landed repair brigades on the colony, scavengers managed to push Eastwood-Gamma from its usual orbit and send it to Tartar, where the hull would be dismantled for scrap, the surviving property resold, and the bodies processed in bioreactors. The mass of the station is huge, and the power of the tugboats and the surviving engines isn’t great, so the flight turned out to be leisurely, but the pirates were happy with it; all during the autumn and the beginning of winter, broken ships and colonies moved to Tartar, and Eastwood-Gamma was just one of many. Having sent the station on its last flight, the scavengers left, having preliminarily installed minefields and putting out beacons, warning everyone that henceforth the station is Tartar’s property. No more trumps came here, and the station leisurely flew forward for 140 days, until her dead calm was disturbed by the unexpected infringer.

  Heading to the center of the colony, Olga meets the Kuznetsov brothers, along with four Marines, in the burned greenhouses—they are just finishing the installation of thermal charges. Work on Eastwood-Gamma is almost over; it’s time to return to their ship.

  “Attention; the Trojan horse has completed its run.”
r />   “So, this must be seen!”

  The Bolsheviks head towards the light well that passes the sun’s rays to the central levels; from here, they can observe what is happening outside without cameras.

  “Uncle Joe, give me the coordinates . . .”

  “Azimuth 40, angle 9, correction 2.”

  “Yeah, we see!”

  In this direction, there is a usual emptiness that doesn’t stand out from the rest of the universe; without a telescope, they can’t see anything from such a distance. Nothing happens for about five seconds. And then, for a moment, the gloom disperses a series of short white flashes, replaced by the dim purple radiance of the detonated reactor, which soon fades away. Again, there is darkness and emptiness.

  “Confirm the death of the Trojan horse.”

  “Now such a howl will rise that even on Pluto they will hear it,” Boris says thoughtfully and suggests continuing their movement. Passing a couple more broken sections and going through a masked tunnel, they enter the Bolshevik, now built into the heart of a gigantic mass grave.

  Approaching Eastwood-Gamma and entering the broken docks at low speed, the cruiser continues its movement, making its way to the core. The Marines clear the way, cutting off the broken bulkheads, which made it possible to get the cruiser practically to the center, next to the reactor that has gone out forever. After this unusual maneuver, the disguise is initiated; the hull of the cruiser is thoroughly camouflaged and covered with wreckage, so that now, when Tartar scouts get inside the giant fragment, they won’t notice anything unusual—at least, they shouldn’t notice.

  They receive fresh analysis from a ship computer. Conclusion number one: the implementation was successful; the alarm wasn’t triggered, none of the mines exploded, and the pirates don’t know that someone penetrated the object they owned. Conclusion number two: the shelter is prepared for the next stage of the operation; everything that can be done with their small forces has already been done. Now it remains only to wait.

  “Well, what's on the news?”

  Boris was right about the howl in the news that would be heard in a few hours on the farthest borders of the solar system. Initially, a series of short flashes and followed crimson glow doesn’t make much of an impression: another ship destroyed during the undeclared war between the Red Dawn and Tartar, nothing special. But then a lot happens. The first message slips through, like a single telegraph key strike over an endless cable. It takes some time to realize the message, about a minute, and then the network simply explodes, sweeping the information barriers erected here and there. It’s sensational news: the Bolshevik, the legendary cruiser Bolshevik, the nightmare of pirates throughout the solar system and the main trump card of the Dawn in the war—that Bolshevik has been destroyed. At full speed, it ran into a minefield, lost all speed, and was finished off by pirates, who immediately used all available nuclear weapons.

  Naturally, this message isn’t immediately believed, simply by virtue of habit. The Bolshevik is so famous, and reports of its death have appeared in the past so often that they have already become part of a kind of space folklore. But this message differs from many others; here, important details were given, the place and time of the cruiser’s death was immediately indicated, and in addition, many people were able to see the crimson glow. And then, when the footage made through the sights arrives, there is no doubt that the Bolshevik has been forever written off from the Navy together with its crew.

  “It’s good that the pirates weren’t greedy about using special ammunition; they appreciate and respect us,” the Captain sums up contentedly, smoking a cigarette. Olga agrees with him, although she is not happy to watch the death of her cruiser, albeit false.

  As the story went, pursuing the pirate group, the Bolshevik ran into a minefield and then was shot down by pirate raiders at the maximum distance; the record of this execution is now being watched by the entire Solar System. Realizing what kind of prey he found, the commander of the enemy squadron decided not to miss his chance and to shoot for sure, using all the nuclear projectiles available in the charging cellars. A series of close explosions caused fatal damage to the cruiser, and then a direct hit completed its destruction, triggering the detonation of the reactor. As a result, the Trojan horse was completely destroyed—that’s exactly what the crew of the hidden Bolshevik wants the world to believe.

  Breaking the siege of Hanoi, the cruiser didn’t stay there for long. After an hour, it again went out into the void, to rush forward and continue to hunt for the enemy’s communications. But this was the first Bolshevik, a.k.a. a Trojan horse. And the second Bolshevik, the real one, in the meantime, leaves Hanoi’s gravity field at the lowest possible speed, along with four of the Red Dawn assault boats docked to its hull. Olga does everything possible to ensure that the last exit into the void isn’t noticed, but all her efforts aren’t enough, and this time, she receives unexpected help. Two ships of the Navy Intelligence cover the cruiser, artfully creating an impenetrable wall of void around it and fully merging small units with the surrounding universe.

  She’s good at her craft, and still Olga is delighted with the work of her colleagues. She hasn’t previously participated in such a complex maneuver, with which she is only familiar in theory. Remotely surrounding the cruiser with a wall of emptiness, the Union officers completely conceal the Bolshevik from sight. Neither the radar, nor the telescopes, nor the mass detectors are now able to detect the cruiser; they aren’t able to tell any observers that the small detachment left Hanoi’s fortress unnoticed. The hardest thing was to hide the engines’ characteristic thermal signature at the start, but for this reason, the Bolshevik was gaining speed unusually slowly, hiding the small power of the engines by the quick start of the Trojan horse.

  The Trojan horse was no less an important part of the operation than the wall of emptiness. The pirates carefully monitored all the movements of the cruiser they hated, and its long absence on the horizon would surely provoke their suspicions. They rightly expect that, having removed the siege from Hanoi, the Bolshevik will immediately continue the fighting; therefore, they shouldn’t deceive the pirates and should sending the Trojan horse forward.

  If the wall of emptiness was provided by the Union, the horse was made by the Queen's engineers, who had built the false Bolshevik over the last few weeks, for which they were provided with some secret information about the cruiser. Once they finished the construction, they dismantled the Trojan horse into parts, loaded it into the military transport, brought it to Hanoi under the cover of the real Bolshevik, and then rebuilt it, like a child’s toy.

  The accuracy of creating a false target must be extremely high; the slightest error is unacceptable. The size and shape of the Trojan horse was identical to the size and shape of the actual cruiser to the millimeter, and all the external elements of the design, including the red stars on the trophy shelf, were identically reproduced. Anastasia and Olga did a lot of work with the Queen's engineers trying to achieve a complete duplication of the radar signature, both at near and far distances. Even harder for the Kuznetsov brothers was the synchronization of the propulsion systems.

  Known for the power of its reactor and engines, the Bolshevik has a characteristic energy signature, well known to the pirates. Not having at their disposal a similar power plant, the engineers had to work hard; almost all the internal space of the Trojan horse was occupied by a bunch of small reactors and fuel tanks. It wasn’t enough for a long flight, of course, but at a short distance, the Trojan horse could run pretty fast, almost as well as the original. Plus, there was one single, but powerful gun: a model that simulates a warship must be able to shoot.

  A lot of other work was put into creating an ideal simulation, designed for only one purpose—to die at the right time in front of the eyes of the entire solar system. And the Trojan horse, which for twelve hours escaped into the operational space, fired on several of Boddicker’s transports, rushed to the minefield, and died under a hail of nuclear shells
—that Trojan horse did its job well, allowing the real Bolshevik to travel unnoticed to Eastwood-Gamma and hide in her ruins.

  “In memory of the heroically dead horse!”

  Olga pours to her friends the trophy rum, and they drink in silence. There’s a short pause, and then they start working again. Time is short, and the orbit correction engines are switched on once again; the burned colony appears on the last straight line. Right ahead is a huge dark spot that covers the stars; they are on the threshold of Tartar.

  Ahead is the L2 zone of gravitational stability, one of the five points in the sun-Earth system where the gravitational attraction of two celestial bodies balances them. The Earth isn’t far, just 1.5 million kilometers away, and it always looks at Tartar with its dark hemisphere, on which Grond is slowly crawling. But the sun, the second creator of this amazing place, has never been seen here; it is constantly hidden behind the dark bulk of the third planet.

  The pirates, who lived in the L2 zone and turned the Big Dump into Tartar, use their own navigation system, according to which the fragments of Eastwood-Gamma approach from the north side. They aren’t alone here; external telescopes see two more scorched stations ahead. All of them are flying to the North Pole, where the cutting plants are located, on which the prisoners’ teams work day and night, dismantling the fragile ships and colonies that are arriving. There they are: flashes of welding on the Limb border, one of the cutting plants where Eastwood-Gamma will end its journey.

  “Attention, comrades: the inspector is coming to visit us!”

  With this unpleasant news, the crew reduces all activity. Granddad jams the reactor, and the Bolshevik plunges into an unusual silence and darkness. The measure is compulsory, as the inspector has already arrived—at the threshold of the cutting plants, Tartar sends robot scouts to check the approaching trophies. The wreckage ahead has already been checked, and now it is Eastwood-Gamma's turn to pass customs.