Event Horizon (Hellgate)

by Mel Keegan

  Every ship in the battle group had already been pinpointed by routine navigation sensors. Now, in less than a second, each was lidar-painted with target acquisition, and without pausing to offer so much as a syllable of negotiation, Vidal stroked the trigger. One trigger, multiple guns, multiple targets.

  Chain guns and railguns opened up along the port side of the Kiev in a blinding broadside, sheeting out the vidfeeds with iris-shriveling tracer. Ten targets were battered simultaneously, and Marin held his breath. He and Travers watched sensor data flash up in the flatscreens beyond the tank. Every ship had been struck in the engine deck, and the risk was calculated to the most minute degree.

  An engineer – Tully Ingersol himself – would have groaned in sympathetic pain. The engine deck of any ship was the most heavily armoured part of the vessel because the Weimann drive was the most delicately balanced and prickly piece of hardware, safer than the Auriga technology it had superseded if only because it was ready to scram itself at the merest suggestion of hazard.

  Without warning to ramp up and interlace Arago fields for their protection, the blockade ships relied on the tonnage of armor sheathing the engine decks, and the Kiev’s guns slammed into them brutally hard. Plates warped and tore; gasses gushed away into space, some burning, some venting in great purple and green streamers which froze into micro-meteorites of crystalline ice and burst like fireworks against the Kiev’s own Arago fields.

  The data racing through the flatscreens looked good. Marin’s heart beat a tattoo on his ribs, but the numbers were sound. Travers’s eyes were unblinking as he watched the same displays, and his fingers drummed on the side of the tank. In the shadows beyond the workstations the command corps had gathered as spectators. Coffee had been passed around and was ignored as the stratagem played out.

  “Watch it, Mick,” Hubler barked, “you’ve lost line of sight on the Horme.”

  “Tell me about it.” Vidal switched to missiles and launched three, a brace of Shrikes. The rudimentary AI of each was loaded with its target – the frigate that had just slipped behind the cruiser Bilbao, which was drifting, venting gas, great gouts of pink and blue combustion erupting from the ruin of its engine deck.

  “Missiles,” Rodman said doubtfully.

  “I know that, too.” Vidal smothered a curse. “I’d hoped not to need the damn’ things.”

  Missiles had the potential to do a lot more damage than the railguns, as Marin and Travers were keenly aware, but as the Horme slithered into the cover of the crippled cruiser her techs would be scrambling to get sublight engines online. Seconds more, and she would be underway.

  Across the battle group, most ships were slow to maneuver and some looked completely disabled. The Bilbao itself was in such a critical state, the sublight engines would be as dormant as the Weimann drive. According to sensors, both her reactors had autoscrammed. The engine deck was flooded with toxic gas; the armordoors would have sealed it off the instant personnel were out, and the ship was not going anywhere.

  The frigates Phaeton and Elpis and the cruiser Livorno were in similar shape, but five other vessels were lumbering on sublight engines, making slow time as if they were operating on storage cells with scrammed reactors and engine decks so toxic, techs could only work there in armor.

  Again the port railguns opened up, raking three of the five viable ships, and Marin watched the data flow through the displays like multicoloured liquid. Distress signals issued from the cruiser Durban, and escape pods began to punch out of the lower decks and rear compartments. The pods were caught swiftly in tractors and reeled in to hatches in the upper decks, but the Durban’s engine deck was a poisonous wasteland of leaking coolants and high pressure fuel vapor. Only drones would work there for the next month. Her blast doors were closed, Weimanns and sublight offline, reactors shut down while the AI bleated for help.

  From the far side of the cruiser Bilbao, the Horme erupted in a storm of chemical fire which briefly enveloped the hull. Sensors whited out into nonsense for several moments, and when data restabilized Vidal swore bitterly. “Two Shrikes in the sterntubes,” he rasped. “She’s open to space on most decks. I’m seeing bugout pods – Asako, track them. You’re trying to account for about 200 crew, give or take.”

  “You’re not going to see that many,” Rodman warned. “Ten pods … fourteen. Eighteen … no more.” She was too busy to look up. “That’s maybe 140, 150 survivors. A lot of the rest will still be aboard, in armor.”

  “Hey – watch the Tabriz!” Hubler’s voice cut like a knife. “She’s got power – she’s coming about, goddamn it.”

  She was a cruiser, three times the size of the frigates with a crew of around 500 and power an order of magnitude greater than a ship like the Horme. Vidal was there at once, hands flying over the instrument surfaces. “Got it. Asako, punch a comm line through the blackout, and make it fast.”

  Three seconds, four, five, dragged like hours before Rodman said, “You’re on the air.”

  Vidal pressed the combug more firmly into his ear. “Commander Tabriz, this is Kiev Ops. Leave it alone. Don’t make it worse.” He looked over his shoulder, directly at Rusch. “Who am I talking to?”

  “That’s Colonel Piotr van Meerkerk … and you’re wasting your breath, Michael.” Rusch came to the tank and glared into the display, where the cruiser was wallowing around to present her forward guns. “They could hurt us,” she warned.

  “They could, if we sat here and let them do it,” Vidal muttered. “Roark!”

  “Aragos are ramped and interleaved,” Hubler assured him.

  “Colonel van Meerkerk, do everybody a favour and leave it alone,” Vidal invited in a steely tone, but van Meerkerk did not even deign to respond. Vidal repeated the warning a third time before he sighed, a hiss through his teeth, and stroked the fire controls again.

  He raked the dorsal surfaces of the Tabriz with every railgun the Kiev possessed – bigger cannons, firing heavier ordnance, than the Tabriz could muster. The cruiser staggered, Arago fields overloading under the onslaught. Vidal’s target was one specific point on the hull, and both Marin and Travers groaned as they saw what he was doing.

  He had targeted the most heavily armored point on the cruiser’s spine, and the Kiev had the power to take the prize surgically. Cocooned in that armor were the Ops room, the flightdeck, the AI core. He was playing a shrewd hunch, Marin knew – that the suicidal attack on the super-carrier was the business of a small group of hardline Confederation loyalists. Eliminate them, and the crew of the Tabriz would be grateful to walk away from this encounter.

  The cruiser’s Arago fields were powerful enough to put a critical drain on the ship’s power. She lumbered, began to list as sublight engines went intermittent, and her starboard cannons opened up on the Kiev for just moments before the Arago generators overcooked and shut down. Unimpeded, the broadside from Vidal’s railguns battered into the ship’s spine, and a crater opened where Ops and flightdeck had been.

  The AI went offline, and as Marin and Travers watched, escape pods began to blow out along the dorsal section of the cruiser’s hull. The lower decks would be safe enough as armordoors slammed, sealed, to close off the damage, and the distress calls issuing from the Tabriz were entirely human.

  “Their AI’s not coming back up,” Rodman reported. “She’s finished … but I’m seeing energy signatures off the Santa Marta you’re not going to like.”

  She was another cruiser, wallowing like a pig in mud beyond the wreckage of the Horme and the hulk of the Bilbao, where a smattering of data indicated localized generators cranking up to manage life support and comm. As the Bilbao began to call for help, the Santa Marta swung around in weird slow motion to present her starboard cannons, and again Vidal swore bitterly.

  “Don’t waste your breath,” Rusch advised. “That’s Colonel Vanessa Fourneau … she’ll fight to the last drop of her crew’s blood. This one traces her ancestry right back to some tallship captain at Trafalgar.”

&nb
sp; “And you have a clear shot, Mick,” Hubler said harshly.

  “Don’t waste it,” Marin whispered more to himself than to Vidal.

  Vidal had no intention of wasting the opportunity. The vidfeed overloaded with sun-bright tracer as railguns and chain guns scythed through the cruiser’s Arago fields. Fourneau fed so much power to the Aragos that her engines went dark and cannons were inoperable – anything to hold off the broadside.

  “Shit,” Hubler muttered, “shitshit, you seein’ what I’m seein’?”

  The Kiev’s port side railguns were starting to show overheat warnings. Vidal had noticed this in the same moment as Hubler. His face was taut as he touched his combug. “Carrier pilot, acknowledge.”

  The voice belonged to a woman, not a young woman, and thick with the accent of Lushiar. Marin grinned wolfishly at Travers as he imagined a tiny Lushi woman, smaller than Bill Grant or Tonio Teniko, and older than both of them combined, with the power of the super-carrier under her bare hands. “I hear you, Mick.”

  So Vidal knew her – Marin was not surprised. “Roll her over, Bernice,” he said tersely. “Fast as you can, bring the starboard guns to bear.”

  “Doing it right now.” A certain glee stitched through the pilot’s voice.

  “Bernice Fong,” Rusch said quietly. “One of the best in the business. Hold on, now.”

  Collision alarms shouted through the ship, but it was a matter of regulation. The Kiev rolled like a porpoise, and with the exception of a momentary weird sensation in the pit of his belly, a certain conviction of his inner ear that the deck had fallen out from under his feet, Marin felt nothing much. The big ship stabilized, and as fresh guns came to bear Vidal’s fingers dove back for the triggers.

  Just as he hit them, the comm began to scream. “Kiev Ops, Kiev Ops, hold your fire! Kiev Ops, this is Santa Marta – cease fire. This is the Santa Marta, standing down.” The signal was so distorted, it was impossible to tell if a man or woman was speaking.

  “Who is that?” Vidal angled a hard look at Rusch. “Not Fourneau?”

  “No. It could be her XO, Roy Griffiths.”

  “Colonial?” Vidal wondered.

  “From Jagreth.” Rusch touched her combug. “Is this Major Griffiths?”

  A blast of static white noise, then: “Yes. Is – is that Colonel Rusch? You’re alive, you’re back? Is it a mutiny on the Kiev? Just hold your fire!”

  “This is Rusch,” she told him as comm interference settled down. “Where’s Colonel Fourneau?”

  “At gunpoint.” Griffiths’s voice broke. “Is it mutiny on the Kiev, ma’am? We’re under your guns – we have sublight, but not enough power to run, and if we show you our tail, you’ll put a bloody missile in our sterntubes and we’re dog meat. The Santa Marta is stood down. Repeat, the Santa Marta has powered down.”

  “Well, good for you,” Vidal said into the loop. “Put your colonel somewhere safe, and pull the plug on your Weimanns. Stay right where you are. Acknowledge.”

  “Copy that,” Griffiths said breathlessly. “The Santa Marta is under my command. Are we – is this a fleet-wide mutiny?”

  “Hold your position, Major,” Rusch said firmly. “You’ll be briefed regarding the situation earliest possible, like every other commander.”

  Marin’s eyes were cutting broad swathes through the navtank, making sense of the chaos of information. Markers had been pinned to the ship icons, denoting which were dead in space, which were wreckage – which, like the Santa Marta, had changed their colors. Phaeton, Elpis, Durban, Livorno, Bilbao, Horme, Tabriz, the Santa Marta herself, were all tagged as inactive.

  Just two remained unaccounted for, and Marin had already seen them. Travers moved around for a better view into the tank, and made a bass sound of scorn. “It’s a couple of frigates – the Arke and the Circe ... with just enough sublight capability to limp away.”

  “They’ll be scrambling to get Weimanns online,” Hubler warned. “They’re holding a vector across the system, and they’re dead slow. Five minutes, minimum, before they reach the Weimann exclusion limit.”

  “If they wait that long.” Vidal flexed his hands. “Do we know who’s in command on those ships?” His brows arched at Rusch.

  He was asking, might hardline and furious Confederate officers seize an opportunity to punish the Kiev and even Omaru itself with the noxious fallout from a Weimann ignition, inside the safe distance limit. The shower of hard radiation was potentially lethal to all life. Marin knew enough about it to make his blood run cold – the breakdown of DNA, cancers, cellular mutation. The Weimann drive made an evil weapon. In the two centuries of its development history, it had not yet been used to crush or punish an enemy, but inevitably there must be a first time. And there was no more likely time and place for it to happen, he thought with an icy sense of foreboding, than in the Deep Sky and at the endgame of a battle which the Confederacy was losing. Had lost.

  “Carrier pilot,” Vidal called softly.

  “Yo.” Bernice Fong must have been waiting for this.

  “Plot me a vector to cut them off,” Vidal said in an ominously quiet tone. “Roark, standby tractors.”

  The Kiev had power reserves comparable to the Wastrel, and Marin knew what Vidal was up to. Rusch and Shapiro stood back, content to merely observe as the carrier drove away in the wake of the fleeing frigates.

  The AI had edited the battle group data into one brief, coherent bottom line, and Travers’s mouth compressed as he read it. The cruiser Livorno and the frigate Phaeton were signaling surrender, and in both cases it was a junior officer calling frantically over the comm with pleas for the Kiev to cease fire, garbled accounts of officers at gunpoint. Those ships were critically disabled, with AIs begging to be towed to dock facilities. A lieutenant on the Livorno was swearing by several gods from Earth’s subcontinent that his crew would be glad to jettison the cruiser’s main gun batteries, if the Kiev did not trust their oath of surrender.

  Alexis Rusch wore a weary, relieved expression as she fielded the call. “Who is this?”

  “Lieutenant Takagi.” He paused to find his breath. “I’m just the head of the Arago team ma’am, the command corps is under arrest – don’t fire on us. No one on this ship wanted to attack the Kiev.”

  “Who’s your senior officer not in custody, Lieutenant?” She was leaning on the side of the tank, studying the plot of crippled and drifting ships.

  “That would be Captain of Engineers Dreyfuss – but she’s trying to bring one of the reactors online, ma’am. There’s no power, the storage cells melted down. We’ve got life support for a few hours, but it’s already getting cold in here. Engineer Dreyfuss is asking for a tow to the Fleet docks, soonest possible.”

  The dockyards orbited high above the pole of Omaru, and since the engagement began the crew there had been shouting for information. The facility was only lightly armed and armored since it depended on the battle group for defense. By now, every man and woman there knew they were under the guns of mutineers, and Marin realized they must be terrified for their very lives.

  “The docks can’t handle this load,” Shapiro said quietly. “They’re already working on the Aldgate and several smaller ships.”

  “You expected this.” Travers’s brow creased as he looked up through the mauve threedee haze at Shapiro.

  “Of course.” Shapiro adjusted his combug. “Wastrel, this is … Sark. Wastrel, do you copy?”

  Richard Vaurien’s voice was like balm on raw nerves. Marin found himself turning to the sound like a plant to the light. “Sark, we’re ten minutes from Bahrain and monitoring your comm. You’ve got several ships in a bad way. Space is full of escape pods and we’re hearing a lot of distress calls. Do you want us to assist?”

  “Commander Wastrel … go ahead.” Shapiro took a long breath. His eyes closed for a moment, and when they opened they were clear, calm. “Catch the escape pods and vector them to the Sark. Take the crews off the vessels that are in immediate danger, and transfer
them to our simulation deck. Push the worst of the wreckage into orbit around Barhrain … assess the viable hulls, and tow the most salvageable two of them to the polar docks. Park anything else salvageable by Rashid.”

  “Understood,” Vaurien responded. “Sark, do you want us to take care of those runaways for you? On the vector they’re holding, they’re going to pass close to us.”

  For a moment Shapiro seemed to consider it, and then said, “No, Wastrel, we’ll take them. Standby the distressed ships – give priority to them and the escape pods.”

  “Will comply,” Vaurien said easily. “Neil, Curtis, are you online?”

  Travers touched his combug. “Right here, Richard.”

  “We estimate up to a thousand survivors for transfer to your belly deck,” Vaurien warned. “You’re going to need security.”

  “We’re on it.” Travers was already moving.

  The same thought had been on Marin’s mind for days, since the consequences of fighting here were examined, and this predicament had featured prominently in Shapiro’s preparation. “God only knows who and what we’re taking aboard,” he said softly to Shapiro and Rusch. “And we’re not a hundred percent sure of the Sark’s own complement at this time. We’ll set up to wrangle security, with your authorization. Your own people have enough to do.”

  “Do it,” Rusch said without hesitation, though her eyes were still fixed on the display where the frigates Arke and Circe had formed up together, as if for safety in numbers, and by now were a few scant seconds short of tractor range. “And while you’re doing it, I’ll transmit the defection deal. These people need to know the score.”

  The statement had been crafted days before, she had only to drop a cube into a data socket and send it. The message whispered in Marin’s ears as he and Travers turned their attention to security, and it would be received right across the blockade by any ship that still had the power to receive.