Cauldron of Ghosts (eARC)

by David Weber

  “And getting our heads blown off is better than that exactly how?” Grigorev demanded, poking his hand around the edge of the hatch and sending a burst of darts back up the passageway. He still didn’t know exactly how the lunatics they were fighting had managed to blow the hatch on their way in. They shouldn’t have been able to do it, but the truth was that slavers and the other sorts of outlaws who consorted with them were likely to have all sorts of things they weren’t supposed to have in their pockets at any given moment. It went with the paranoia, although he hated to think which of them had been paranoid enough to carry a demo charge that powerful around with him.

  The bad news was that it had let the lunatics in question in; the good news—such as it was and what there was of it—was that it meant they couldn’t close the hatch behind them again. Which did him and the rest of the security personnel Jeremy Benford had managed to get down here a whole hell of a lot of good with at least two people covering the hatch with pulser fire.

  “It’s not going to—” Villanueva started to snap back, then cut herself off as Somogyi’s voice came over their com links.

  “Listen up! Just stay where you are—those people are going to take care of it themselves! Stay out of their way!”

  Villanueva and Grigorev looked at each other. Neither of them was very happy about the thought of being caught between their own lunatics and the attacking lunatics—probably ex-Ballroom, and not all that ex-, given what Villanueva knew about Torch. On the other hand, it beat hell out of trying to get through that hatch themselves, and she found herself hoping the Torches hurried the hell up.

  * * *

  The Mk 17 Tango nosed into the docking bay and opened its ventral hatch. Half a dozen skinsuited Marines floated through it, then used their suit thrusters to take up positions covering the bay’s gallery with an assortment of lethal weaponry. The technicians in that gallery took note of their arrival and were very, very careful about extending the personnel tube to mate with the assault shuttle’s main hatch. The operation took a little longer than usual; none of those technicians wanted any of the passengers aboard that shuttle to find any fault at all with their safety procedures. Within less than three minutes, however, the first squad of Marines came swimming out of the tube into the gallery’s artificial gravity and landed as neatly as so many cats. Big cats, festooned with the sharp, lethal claws of pulse rifles and heavy flechette guns. They unlimbered their own weaponry, and the gallery techs smiled weakly at them.

  The smiles of very small, very inoffensive, very obedient mice trying hard to placate the hunting felines who had just invaded their rathole.

  * * *

  Ayibongwinkosi Kabweza watched approvingly as Lieutenant Tyler’s platoon went to work. Their shuttle had backed off to give them working room—and to avoid any odd bits and pieces of debris which might presently find themselves floating around for some reason—and the ring charges being sealed against the station’s skin. There were some definite minuses to their hastily revised ops plan, but that was the way it went in combat. Nothing was ever neat and tidy when it came down to it, and as she’d told Ali bin Muhammad, when everything else was factored in, fast and dirty gave the slaves in that hold their best chance of survival.

  And however true that might be, there was at least one added incentive to doing it this way. It was unlikely any of the slavers trying to space the slaves had thought to bring along skinsuits of their own, given the lack of warning and improvisational nature of their current efforts.

  Which, when you came right down to it, was about as poetic as justice got.

  * * *

  “Will you hurry?!” Constance Mastroianni snapped.

  The whine and sizzle of pulser darts had faded in intensity behind her, and she wished she could convince herself that was a good thing. Unfortunately, the most probable explanation was that Somogyi’s stooges were lying back to clear the way for the fucking Audubon Ballroom.

  “If you think you can do this better than I can,” Liang MacHowell told her through gritted teeth, his eyes on the lines of code scrolling across his display, “then you can fucking well do it yourself!”

  “All right. All right!” Mastroianni’s right hand made a fluttery, vaguely soothing gesture. “It’s just—”

  She cut herself off with a little shrug, and MacHowell grunted.

  He went on with his work, and Mastroianni turned back to the half-dozen other men and women covering the access hatch behind them. She slapped her palms together two or three times, bouncing on the balls of her feet, feeling the conflicting tides of adrenaline and terror ripsaw their way through her and swore viciously under her breath.

  Royal Torch Marines—yeah, sure they are! she thought harshly. I don’t know what Somogyi’s been smoking, but I’ll be damned if he’s going to hand me over to the frigging Ballroom!

  Constance Mastroianni had been in the trade too long to be taken in by that kind of crap. The Ballroom had almost gotten her once already—if she’d been ten minutes early for that appointment, the bomb that gutted the Manpower office would have gotten her, too—and they weren’t getting another shot. Not unless she had an equalizer of her own in hand, anyway!

  She slapped her palms together again, trying to pretend her own plans weren’t the counsel of despair. After all, they could make sweet promises to her exactly the same way they’d made them to Somogyi, and sooner or later, she’d have to meet their terms. But she could at least make them wait, make them pause and talk to her, walk them back a little bit from the immediate brink of the assault. And they would talk to her, she thought grimly. Once she had control of the emergency jettisoning system, they’d damned well talk to her! And then—

  She stopped herself short again. If she’d been one bit less desperate, it would have occurred to her that the reason she was stopping herself was that she didn’t have a clue about where any negotiations with the Ballroom were ultimately going to end. Or if she did have any clues, she sure as hell didn’t want to dwell on them! But at least she was doing something, not just sitting around on her ass like Somogyi.

  She wheeled back toward MacHowell and stopped herself just before she asked him for yet another progress report. He was a far better hacker than she was, and she knew it. More to the point, nagging him wasn’t going to make him go any faster. It was just—

  Stop that, she told herself firmly. He’ll get there when he gets there, and we’ve isolated the controls from all the rest of the station’s systems. There’s no way anybody outside this compartment can know whether or not we’ve already cracked the access codes. They’re going to have to assume we have, and that means—

  * * *

  “Beta Charge ready!” Sergeant Supakrit X announced over his com, stepping back to a safe distance from the ring charge his section had sealed in place. His team had finished before the other three, he noted with grim satisfaction, even with Vlachos dragging ass as usual.

  He watched the remaining icons on his HUD switch from amber to red as the other charges came live, and smiled.

  “Fire in the hole!” Lieutenant Tyler announced, and pressed the button.

  * * *

  Constance Mastroianni’s ruminations came to an abrupt end as the breaching charges blew four almost perfectly circular divots out of Balcescu Station’s thick skin. A station like Balcescu contained a stupendous amount of atmosphere. All bad holovid features notwithstanding, something that size normally decompressed only slowly—unless, of course, its hull had suffered catastrophic damage.

  Which, come to think of it, was exactly what had happened to Balcescu Station, locally, at least.

  She had time for a single scream of terror.

  * * *

  Aatifa Villanueva and Alexi Grigorev were outside the suddenly ruptured compartment. Unfortunately for them, the station blast doors were behind them, and the hatch into the compartment had already been wrecked. They had more time than Mastroianni—not much, but a little more—to realize what was happening, a
nd it did them not one bit of good.

  * * *

  Well, would you look at that? Supakrit X thought as the first body erupted from the sudden hole in the station’s skin. The woman was still waving her arms, her face twisted in a rictus of absolute, hopeless terror, and the sergeant bared his teeth, thinking about all the slaves who’d experienced the same terror over the years.

  Hers wasn’t the only body to go soaring out into space, and he had no doubt they were going to find other slavers’ bodies inside the compartment. According to the assault shuttle’s sensors, the slaves they’d been trying to jettison were still physically unharmed, although the poor bastards were probably scared half to death. Ironically, the very hatch and heavy pressure bulkheads which sealed the slave hold off from from the station as a whole so that its sentient cargo could be expelled into space without any fuss or bother to the station’s other inhabitants had protected them from the catastrophic depressurization just outside it. And they’d have hours of air inside there with them. There’d be plenty of time to slap patches over the breaches and repressurize the compartment before the Torches needed to pop the hatch and get them out.

  “All right, People,” Lieutenant Tyler said. “Let’s get our point people in there. And remember, there could still be some bastard who’d had time to get into his skin suits before we came calling. Let’s just send anyone like that along to keep his friends company, shall we?”

  As orders went, that one worked just fine for Sergeant Supakrit X.

  Just fine.

  Chapter 45

  Even the surprisingly good coffee of Prince Sundjata’s officer’s lounge dispenser had started tasting like acid to Zachariah McBryde as he sat with his two fellow scientists, watching the smart wall’s imagery. The looming presence of their Gaul guard/executioner was impossible to ignore, but Zachariah wasn’t really worried about anything that might happen to Prince Sundjata. It was obvious to him that Gail Weiss must have been as good at her job as he’d been at his, because every single thing she’d predicted about Bogey One had come true…so far, at last.

  But if that was good news for Prince Sundjata, it was very, very bad news for Luigi Pirandello, and his eyes were bitter as he watched the smart wall.

  The Torch assault shuttles and frigates had launched seventy-seven minutes ago. For closing in on an hour and a half, he’d watched Bogey One steadily pursuing the second slave ship. For nineteen minutes, the range had continued to open, but then the frigate’s superior acceleration had matched velocity with Luigi Pirandello. Over the fifty-eight minutes since, the almost twenty-eight million kilometers between pursuer and pursued had been pared away. Prince Sundjata’s velocity was still higher than Bogey One’s, and the range between her and the Torch warship was still growing, albeit at a slower rate, but it was only a matter of time—and not much of it—before Luigi Pirandello’s desperate race would be over.

  He didn’t realize just how bleak his own expression was. Not till Weiss’ hand came gently down on the white-knuckled fist clenched around his coffee cup. He turned his head towards her, and she smiled sadly.

  * * *

  “We’ve got a signal coming in, Sir,” Jürgen Acker, Roldão Brandt’s com officer, said flatly.

  Captain Brandt sighed and took off his cap to run his fingers through his hair yet again, then paused, looking down at it. He grimaced and tossed it onto his console, then leaned back in his command chair and crossed his legs.

  “Put it through,” he said resignedly.

  “—is Lieutenant Commander Tunni Bayano, commanding the Royal Torch Navy ship Denmark Vesey,” He heard. “At present acceleration rates, you will be in my missile envelope in four-point-seven minutes. If you have not agreed to surrender within the next five minutes, I will open fire. This is your first and only warning. Bayano, clear.”

  With the range down to ten million kilometers, the transmission lag was only a little over thirty light-seconds, so there was time for Brandt to consider his response. Not much time, however, and he turned his head to raise his eyebrows at Hinkley.

  “Well?”

  “We’re fucked,” Hinkley snorted. “But at least he’s giving us a chance to surrender.”

  “Of course he is. He wants the cargo delivered safe and sound. Doesn’t necessarily mean he has any warm and fuzzy feelings for us, though.”

  They looked at one another for a moment, then Brandt shrugged and glanced at the com officer.

  “Put me through to them.”

  “Yes, Sir!” The com officer didn’t even try to hide his relief as he To command into his console. “Open mike, Sir,” he said, and Brandt drew a deep breath.

  “This is a slave ship,” he said as calmly as he could, “and it’s not unheard of for Manticoran, Havenite, and Beowulfan warships to space the crews of captured slave ships. I can only assume that your Royal Torch Navy will follow the same policy. So I don’t really see where accepting your offer and surrendering would do me or my crew very much good.”

  The response came back almost exactly one minute later, as if his counterpart had been expecting the query/protest and had his reply ready and waiting.

  “First, it is the policy of the navies you just listed to automatically space captured slavers only if those slavers have killed some or all of the slaves on board. Granted, it sometimes happens anyway, but I feel certain that if you surrender your ship, you won’t have been stupid enough to have killed any slaves aboard it first. Second, we are not Manticorans, Havenites, or Beowulfers. Torch has declared war on Mesa, and we intend to press the fight until you surrender unconditionally. We intend not simply to punish those involved in the criminal enterprise of genetic slavery, but to destroy that institution completely. We will press the fight until we receive unconditional surrender, and we consider all Manpower and/or Jessyk Combine starships to be military combatants. That means we will not feel bound by any of the niceties of interstellar admiralty law when it comes to…apprehending them. We will, however, honor the provisos of the Deneb Accords where enemy combatants are concerned. As such, we will consider any who surrender to us prisoners of war and treat them accordingly. There is, however, one proviso, you understand, which is that you have been smart enough to do no harm to any slaves aboard your ship. If you violate that proviso, you might as well shoot yourselves right now and save us the trouble of shoving you out of the air locks.”

  “Do I have your word on that, Sir?”

  Bayano’s voice, hitherto flat and emotionless, had taken on a distinctly sarcastic tone when it came back forty seconds later.

  “I’m an ex-slave myself. Until a few months ago, when I was commissioned, I went by the name of Tunni X. I find it interesting that you now think my word is worth having in the first place.”

  “What can I say?” Brandt picked his cap up and put it back on again. “We’re living in a new galaxy.”

  “You have my word,” Bayano said flatly forty-seven seconds later. “And you’d better check the time, because you have exactly fifty-two seconds left in which to surrender.”

  “Very well,” Brandt said heavily. “We surrender. What do you want us to do?”

  “Continue your acceleration,” Bayano instructed him. “At your acceleration rate, our velocities will equalize in approximately twenty-five minutes. At that time, the range will be just over two million kilometers. You will place your entire crew aboard your small craft and abandon ship at that point. My pinnace will then make rendezvous with your vessel and my people will board it. Any member of your crew found on board at that time will be subject to summary execution. If we determine that any of the slaves aboard your ship have been killed, I will open fire on your small craft, and there will be no survivors. Is that clearly understood? Do you have anything you want to tell me now about the status of the slaves aboard your vessel?”

  Brandt nodded to himself in understanding. Given Luigi Pirandello’s present velocity, it would have been impossible for her to decelerate to zero relative to the
system primary before crossing the hyper limit. Obviously, Denmark Vesey had no intention of allowing him to slip away into hyper. By continuing to accelerate towards the limit, however, he effectively added his own ship’s maximum acceleration to the frigate’s deceleration, allowing them to equalize velocity at such a relatively short range.

  “As you said,” his tone was weary when he replied, “I’m not stupid enough to have harmed any of them with a frigate on my ass. Your conditions are clearly understood. We will comply.”

  “Good. Bayano, clear.”

  Brandt sat motionless a moment longer, tipped back in his chair, then let it come upright and swiveled it to face the rest of his bridge crew.

  “Anyone have anything to say?” he asked almost whimsically.

  “I don’t know how our people are going to react to abandoning ship,” Hinkley said. She looked around the bridge uncertainly, her hands almost flapping about. “You know some of them are going to figure this is just a way for the Torches to get us far enough away from the cargo for them to burn us all out of space without risking any damage to their friends in the slave holds, don’t you?”

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” Brandt retorted.

  “I know one thing,” Acker said, his expression grim. “First thing we better do is put Voigt and Ingraham in irons.”

  “Or just shoot ’em,” Hinkley agreed. “God, we don’t want either of them running around loose once the entire crew hears about this! The holds all have individual spacing controls, and those two—!”

  That was a mark of incipient panic. What she’d said was true…but the captain could lock down all the holds from right here on the command deck. He took three steps to his own console and began keying in the commands. Within ten seconds it was done.

  Still, she and Acker had a point. Even if Voigt and Ingraham could no longer inflict any wholesale harm on the slaves, they could still start killing them one at a time, which would have exactly the same result when the Torch boarding party came aboard and found the bodies. Whether or not Bayano intended to keep his word and allow them to live as long as they complied with his surrender terms—all his surrender terms—Brandt had no doubt at all that he would shoot every personnel shuttle out of space if they failed to comply with their side of those terms.