Shadow of Freedom-eARC

by David Weber

  Major Pole didn’t doubt the governor was already scheming to come up with an official explanation which would make the destruction of Vice Admiral Dubroskaya’s squadron entirely her fault. The idea was ridiculous, but in the competition between a dead Frontier Fleet admiral and a live Frontier Security governor, the one who was still breathing was almost certain to come out on top, regardless of any inconvenient little things like facts. Under the circumstances, the last thing Pole could afford would be to simultaneously disappoint Dueñas and give the governor an excuse to hang the League’s humiliating surrender on him. In the end, someone was going to be scapegoated for what had happened here, and whoever it was would be fortunate if all that happened was that his career came to an abrupt and ignominious end. More likely, the powers that were would decide an example had to be made, and John Pole had no intention of providing the example. The survival rate for ex-gendarmes who found themselves guests of the penal system was far too low for that.

  The problem was that Ascher might well be right about whether or not Zavala was willing to push things. He truly might send in those boarders to reclaim the Manties by force. For that matter, he truly might be so crazy he really would treat Solarian gendarmes as common pirates if they fell into his hands!

  “We can’t just play dead for him,” he said finally. “That’s completely unacceptable.”

  Kristoffersen and Ascher glanced at each other, then back at him, and he bared his teeth.

  “They may think it’s going to be easy to get into this module,” he said. “If they do, it’s up to us to demonstrate their error. We’ve probably got more troopers in here than they have boarders out there, there are only so many ways they can come at us, we know the station a hell of a lot better than they do, and we’ve also got the advantage of the defensive position. We’ve got a lot more heavy weapons than we saw in this, too.” He jabbed an angry finger at the recording they’d all just viewed. “If they try to fight their way in, we’ll massacre them!”

  “And if they use their cruisers’ point defense to blow a way in from the outside, Sir?” Ascher asked.

  “There’s no way even a maniac would do that.” Pole waved his hand dismissively. “You think they’re going to risk explosively depressurizing the entire module when they’re so anxious to get their people back unharmed?” He shook his head. “No, if they try to fight their way in here, they’re going to have to come to us on our terms. And when they do, we’ll bleed them.”

  Ascher’s eyes looked doubtful, and the major glared at her.

  “I’m not going to just hand over their spacers against direct orders without at least trying to hang onto them,” he said flatly. “And I think they may be more amenable to reason once they figure out how much trying to take them back by force is going to cost.”

  Ascher still looked unconvinced, but Pole didn’t really care. He didn’t believe for a moment that he could hang onto the interned Manties indefinitely, but he was confident he could inflict heavy casualties on any Manty attempt to fight their way into Victor Seven, and when he did, they’d pull back to rethink. At that point, if he were this Zavala, he’d find a way to tighten the screws on Dueñas. There was no doubt in Pole’s mind that anyone with the only operable warships in a star system could find a way to convince that system’s governor to see reason sooner or later, especially when the governor in question was stuck out in the open where the Manties could get at him without killing the people they wanted to rescue themselves. And if Zavala convinced Dueñas to order Pole to hand the internees over, even it was obviously only under duress, the monkey was off the major’s back.

  And if he can’t convince Dueñas to play ball, I’m no worse off than I was before, he thought. In fact, if I lose a couple of dozen gendarmes and then hand over the Manties “to prevent further bloodshed,” I may even be able to make a case for its being Dueñas’ fault for ordering me not to cough them up in the first place. If I phrase my report right, make it clear I was prepared to go all the way and only backed down to save Solarian lives from a homicidal neobarb once it became obvious my civilian superior had misread the situation disastrously, the Gendarmerie will be in a hell of a lot better position to hammer Frontier Security over this instead of our carrying the can.

  * * *

  “Well, time’s up, My Lady,” Gutierrez said.

  “Indeed it is,” Abigail agreed. “So I suppose we should go ahead and get this ship off the field. If you’d be so good, Mateo?”

  “Of course, My Lady.”

  Gutierrez nodded and glanced around to be sure all his people were where he’d told them to be before he stepped cautiously to the edge of the corridor down which Kristoffersen had departed in such high dudgeon. He extended a sensor wand into the corridor’s mouth, and the multi-spectrum pickup projected a detailed heads-up view of the passageway onto the inside of his skinsuit helmet. He cycled through the visible spectrum into infrared and then into ultraviolet and grunted in unsurprised satisfaction as he spotted the web of tripwire lasers covering the last third or so of the forty-meter corridor. The blast doors at the far end, where the spoke-like axial passage actually entered Victor Seven, were closed, but someone had cut what looked suspiciously like firing loopholes through the heavy-duty panels.

  A little closer inspection showed that the tripwires he’d picked up were connected to anti-personnel mines which had been attached to the bulkheads and deckhead. The mines were covered with nanotech chameleon skin designed to blend into the alloy to which they’d been affixed, but the people who’d emplaced them were gendarmes, more skilled in thuggery than any sort of actual military training. They hadn’t even bothered to detach the laser sensors from the mines; they’d left them mounted on the mine housings, and with that for a starting point, it wasn’t hard for his sensor wand to locate the mines by their internal powerpacks.

  “You know, My Lady,” he said absently, still cataloging threats, “if we were willing to get in line and march straight down the middle of the passageway here—and maybe go ahead and paint big bulls-eyes on our chests, too—they probably could get a lot of us.”

  “I know how good you are, Mateo,” Abigail replied soothingly. “There’s no need to be nasty to them just because they aren’t. I’m sure they’re doing the very best they can.”

  “The scary thing is you’re probably right about that.”

  He studied his HUD for a few more moments, then nodded.

  “’Bout what we expected, My Lady. Not much finesse, but let’s be fair. It’s a straight corridor into the first blast door. How much room for finesse is there?”

  “I suppose that depends on a lot of factors,” she said with a crooked smile. “Go ahead and get their attention, Mateo.”

  “Aye, aye, My Lady.”

  * * *

  The gendarmerie squad on the far side of those blast doors had failed to notice Gutierrez’ sensor wand, but Sergeant Clinton Abernathy, the squad’s leader, had grown increasingly nervous as the minutes ticked by. This wasn’t the kind of crap he’d signed up for, and the rumors about what this particular batch of neobarbs had already done only made bad a lot worse.

  He didn’t like any part of this, and he failed to share Major Pole’s confidence that these people would back down in the face of a demonstration of manly determination. Perhaps that was because he and his squad had been chosen to do the initial demonstrating.

  There were three access routes to Victor Seven from the rest of Shona Station. This one, following the main axial from the lift shafts, was the most direct and the broadest, which made it the logical path for a full-fledged assault. The second route ran through the materials-handling conduit, through which consumables and refuse were transported into and out of the habitat module. It hadn’t been planned for humans to use, however, and it would have been a cramped and tortuous way to get at the module’s garrison. At the moment, all of its blast doors had been closed and remote sensors had been set to alert the defenders if those doors were disturb
ed. It seemed unlikely anyone would try coming that way, but if they did, there’d be plenty of warning in time to get blocking forces into position.

  The third possible way in was really designed as an emergency evacuation route, and it was less liberally supplied with blast doors, since it was supposed to stay open and accessible for people trying to get out of Victor Seven in the face of disaster. The good news was that it had a lot more bends and was rather narrower than the axial passageway, even if it was more accessible than the materials tube. They’d had to position more people to cover it, but they had good fields of fire and the Manties would have to come out in the open around the turns in the corridor wall to get at them.

  But still—

  “Movement!” Corporal Marjorie Pareja snapped suddenly.

  “What? Where?!” Abernathy demanded, peering at the handheld display feeding from the fixed pickup on the far side of the blast doors.

  “Zebra-Tango!” Pareja replied.

  * * *

  Gutierrez watched as the sensor remote he’d bounced up the passageway rolled to a stop just short of the first line of mines. He didn’t really need it, but seeing how quickly the other side reacted to it should be informative.

  “One…two…three…four…”

  He’d just reached “seven” when a burst of pulser darts from one of the loopholes destroyed the remote.

  “Lord,” he muttered. “These clowns are as pathetic as those bas—I mean, as those jackasses on Tiberian, My Lady.”

  He shook his head. Seven seconds to react at all, and then instead of a single shot the morons had fired an entire burst? The ricocheting pulser darts had taken out three of their own mines, and it wasn’t even as if the remote had been telling him anything he hadn’t already known in the first place!

  “Don’t complain, Mateo,” Abigail said sternly.

  “I’m not. It’s just—”

  He shrugged irritably, a master craftsman frustrated by the slovenly workmanship of a would-be competitor, and glanced at Senior Chief Petty Officer Franklin Musgrave, Tristram’s boatswain.

  “Ready, Frank?”

  “Ready,” Musgrave confirmed.

  “Then punch it.”

  “Fire in the hole!”

  Musgrave slid just the muzzle of his weapon around the edge of the corridor and squeezed the firing stud. It was an awkward angle, and despite the stabilizing pressor beam projected against one of the lift shafts from the launcher’s other end, the recoil was significant. Musgrave had expected that, however. He kept control of the bucking launcher without much difficulty, and the projectile’s flight path had been programmed to allow for the muzzle rise as it departed downrange. Because of the short range—the other end of the passage was actually inside the launcher’s danger zone—and the fact that no one in his right mind wanted to be within forty or fifty meters of a kinetic strike from a weapon that powerful, they’d had to step down its normal acceleration rate considerably and go with the chemical shaped-charge warhead, instead of its usual dart-like penetrator. Even that was bad enough, since it was designed to take out light armored vehicles, but at least the vast majority of the blast would expend itself on the other side of the blast doors.

  Sergeant Clinton Abernathy had a single, fleeting instant to realize what the launcher was before it fired, but that was all the warning he had before he, the blast doors, and his entire squad ceased to exist.

  * * *

  “Jesus Christ!”

  Surprise jerked the blasphemy out of Kristoffersen as Abernathy’s squad was wiped from existence.

  “That was a tank-killer!” his company first sergeant blurted.

  “No! You think?!” Kristoffersen snarled with a baleful glare that closed the first sergeant’s mouth with snap. “Tell Lieutenant Boudreaux to reinforce Axial One and Axial Three. And tell his people to keep their heads frigging down! These bastards’ve got heavier weapons than we thought.”

  * * *

  “That was noisy,” Gutierrez observed. He tossed another remote down the corridor and grimaced. “Messy, too.”

  “They had their chance to do it the easy way, Mateo,” Abigail replied harshly. “Like you say, even those bastards on Tiberian were smarter than this! Let’s keep the pressure on them.”

  “Aye, aye, My Lady.”

  * * *

  “Well, at least they’re not shy,” Major Pole growled, studying his tactical display. None of the Manties Kristoffersen had seen before he withdrew to deliver Lieutenant Hearns’ ultimatum had been armed with anything like that tank-killer. That was going to make things messier, but weapons that heavy were going to be less useful to the attackers as they moved into Victor Seven proper. They weren’t going to have any more firing lines as long as that first one, and without powered armor of their own, no one was going to want to be anywhere near the back blast from something like that when it was confined and channeled by one of the station’s passageways.

  That was the good news. The bad news was that now that they’d blown their way past the late Sergeant Abernathy’s squad, their menu of approach routes got a lot broader. Pole’s people knew the internal geography of their habitat far better than the Manties possibly could, but covering all the possible approaches with enough forward-deployed firepower to stop people equipped with such heavy weapons was going to take a lot of manpower.

  He considered offering to hand over the internees now that the Manties had demonstrated they were serious, but he couldn’t do that…yet. If he didn’t want to be the one who ended up carrying the can for this entire debacle, he had to be able to argue that he’d genuinely tried to obey the ridiculous, unreasonable orders he’d been given, and that meant he was going to have to accept heavier casualties before he recognized the inevitable and gave in. It was unfortunate, of course, but at least his command post was well back from the point of contact. He was pretty sure he’d have time to accrue sufficient casualties to cover his ass before the actual fighting got anywhere near him.

  * * *

  “Okay, things are about to get tricky, My Lady,” Gutierrez said.

  He was two blast doors deeper into Victor Seven, and Abigail had downloaded the damage control guide’s memory to his skinsuit as well as her own. More copies had been uploaded to Nicasio Xamar, Tristram’s assistant tactical officer, as well as to Senior Chief Musgrave and all the other senior noncoms attached to the boarding party. Now Abigail and Gutierrez studied the imagery together, even though they were the better part of fifty meters apart.

  “We could cut through this engineering crawlway,” Gutierrez pointed out, highlighting the crawlway in question on both HUDs. “That’d get us around behind them right here.”

  He highlighted the closed, loopholed blast doors just ahead of his current position, where the gendarmes had set up another strongpoint.

  “If we were actually trying to fight our way through them, that would probably be a good idea,” Abigail replied. “Since we’re not…?”

  “Since we’re not, I guess we need to knock on the door again,” Gutierrez replied.

  He sat back, thinking for a moment. As he’d said, things were about to get tricky. To get at the strongpoint, the Manticorans would have to make their way around a relatively sharp bend in the passageway. The problem was that they’d be exposed to fire from the gendarmes the instant they poked their heads around the turn. There wasn’t room for them to use Musgrave’s launcher here, either. With a Marine fire team in proper powered armor, a heavy tri-barrel, and a plasma rifle, it would have been a straightforward tactical problem. Without any of those, he was just going to have to adapt, improvise, and overcome.

  “MacFarlane!”

  “Yes, LT?” PO 1/c William MacFarlane replied.

  “Bring your little friend up here.”

  “On my way, LT.”

  MacFarlane, one of Tristram’s damage control specialists, crawled up behind Gutierrez less than a minute later. The Marine-turned-armsman slithered back a little so that he a
nd MacFarlane could both look at a hand display.

  “We need to make that door go away,” Gutierrez said, tapping the display. “Think your pet’s up to it?”

  “Oh, yeah,” MacFarlane replied. “Course, the people on the other side’re going to be trying to stop him.”

  “I think we can probably do a little something about that,” Gutierrez told him. “Mind you, it would work better with a Bravo Charlie, but I guess we’ll just have to make do.”

  “Don’t you be hurting Denny’s feelings, LT!” MacFarlane retorted with a grin. “He’ll do just fine.”

  “So let me get the cheering section organized and then you can show me.”

  * * *

  Sergeant Norman Dreyfus wished his skinsuit allowed for old-fashioned brow wiping. It wouldn’t have changed anything, but at least he might have felt better.

  He also wished to hell he knew exactly what the advancing Manties were up to at the moment. Unfortunately, they’d been systematically taking out the sensors the gendarmes had emplaced. In fact, they’d been swatting sensors with ridiculous ease as they advanced—obviously the people responsible for planting those sensors hadn’t concealed them anywhere nearly as well as they’d thought—which meant the best he could do was guess about what they were doing. That didn’t make him happy…and the fact that their current location appeared to be just on the other side of his current location didn’t make him any happier.

  The intruders were working their way inward along two separate routes, moving with a certain degree of caution but without any particular effort to disguise their intentions. Not that there would have been much point in subtlety, since there weren’t all that many possible approaches.