The Mutineer's Daughter

by Chris Kennedy

  Walking up and forward toward the bridge, the first people he ran into were CDR Ashton and an uncomfortable-looking Master at Arms petty officer. It seemed clear the old XO was in charge of this detail, not the mutinous enlisted man who escorted her.

  “Commander, I let you out of the brig for your help with the battle, not for you to have free reign of the ship.”

  “Screw that and screw you too, Benno,” she answered, her commanding voice firm. “I didn’t ask you after Paradiso, but I’m damn sure I’ll ask now. I want you to release the other loyalists and me on Morgan’s Rock.”

  “No. Absolutely not.”

  She threw up her hands. “Why the hell not!? We’re not assets in your fight. If anything, we remain a threat to everything you still plan to do, or have you forgotten you’ve locked away a bunch of comms and systems engineers in one section of your ship?”

  “You all are contained, and we’ve been able to keep you in check thus far.”

  “Benno, that’s because they made the assumption you’d free them when the opportunity arose, and maybe—maybe—because not all of them completely disagree with why you did what you did. But if you don’t let them go now? I guarantee their faith in your kindness to prisoners of war will be mighty short-lived.”

  “No.” Benno gave her as firm and steady a look as he could muster. “If I let you go, the first thing you’ll do is alert the Navy and the central worlds. If we don’t already have the fleet after us, we absolutely will after that! Besides, you’re still a resource we can use.”

  “Keep me then! Let the others go! You have more than enough room on that dropship.”

  “No.”

  “Put us down somewhere out of comms! Find us a deserted island or something.”

  He shook his head. “No. Besides, Morgan’s Rock has a low habitability rating. Living outside a dome would be a death sentence. On Paradiso, there were plenty of places, but we failed to have this conversation then.”

  “God damn it, Benno!”

  He raised his hands, trying to placate her. “Adelaide has remote, livable locales. We could safely put you on the surface there without unduly endangering the rest of our mission. And there’s some question about whether I’ll continue to be in charge after we free that planet. I absolutely won’t leave you to the mercies of some other person in charge, okay? Adelaide. One more battle, and we’ll let the loyalists off. I promise.”

  She glared at him, but her shoulders slumped. “Fine.”

  Benno glanced at the second-class petty officer. “Please escort the XO back to the brig, MA2.”

  The enlisted man complied and firmly led a now unresisting CDR Ashton back to her cell. Benno continued to the bridge.

  When he arrived, Petty Officer Bailey, a first-class navigator/quartermaster, held the deck as OOD. The young woman turned to him. “Sir, SSTOD 2 is away, on approach to a re-entry over the capitol dome, ummm, Lost Vegas?”

  “Yes, QM1 Bailey,” he answered, smiling. “The Rockers have an odd sense of humor. If you ever get a chance, you should visit “What the Hell Did We Just Do.” It’s a fun town, for a dome.”

  “Ummm, aye aye, sir.”

  A voice on the space comm interrupted their reveries. “OOD, TAO. Superluminal emergence, one ship, near the center of the system. Small gravity pulse. Looks like a courier vessel or a rescue cutter.”

  “OOD, aye. Let me know when you fingerprint it.”

  The hairs rose on the back of Benno’s neck. There was no reason for it, but he suddenly felt as if someone had entered the room, glaring at him.

  “TAO, OOD, roger. Looks like an ALS Navy fast courier, but registry transponder and current comms are encrypted.”

  Bailey frowned. “So, unencrypt it, CIC.”

  “Roger that, OOD. The problem is we don’t have the key. They may be transmitting on a key specific to home fleet. I can’t unencrypt their comms to see what they’re passing. We don’t carry that one. The Libertad is answering in kind, though.”

  Benno sat down and strapped in. “OOD, go to General Quarters! Navigator and CIC, plot a course for transit to the nearest system that doesn’t require us to pass close to the Libertad or the other ships. Work on a new transit chain after that to get us to Adelaide.”

  The General Quarters alarm sounded. The OOD moved to strap into her seat, but a look of confusion covered her face. “Sir?”

  “A naval courier, specifically transmitting so we alone can’t see what they’re saying? We need to go! And transmit to the dropship! Tell Pilot Pierce what’s going on. We can’t wait, and they need to be prepared to either turn around and catch us or put in for an opposed landing!”

  “Ummm, aye aye, sir…”

  “Skipper,” the tech at the bridge comms station turned to him. “Sir, we’ve got a broadcast in the clear from the commodore’s ship.”

  Benno bit his lip. Everyone was moving so slowly! Was it just his adrenaline, or were they all in denial, reluctant to let go of the false sense of normalcy being back with the fleet permitted them? “Put it on speaker, Comms.”

  “Puller, this is 757 Actual on Libertad,” Commodore Carter said. “You are to heave to and go to zero thrust. Prepare to be boarded for possible inquiry into your status. You are directed to have CDR Ashton reply on a separate, encrypted tight beam transmission immediately.”

  That feeling of someone entering the bridge, of someone glaring at him? Benno knew now who it was. Murphy had finally arrived to enforce his law.

  Benno yelled, “Navigation, CIC, this is the CO! Where is that solution?! What is the status of the dropship?”

  He wondered what had exposed them in the end. Was it their fake fleet orders to Commodore Carter and his squadron? Was it a lost vessel report from the Executive Amber fleet, in far distant Terran Union space? Was it something they had missed from the imprisoned loyalists? Something else entirely?

  “Sir, the dropship has been ordered to halt their approach to Morgan’s Rock. They’ve gone to zero thrust but have not yet changed course. No reply to us,” the Comms watch stander said.

  The TAO in CIC answered on the heels of the last report. “Sir, all our transit vectors in this area, and from this orbit, are either deeper into the Alliance, or are too far of a jump. If we try to transit across a geodesic path more than 15 light-years in length without extensive prep, we could miss-aim and wind up shooting past the target star and end up thousands or millions of light years away. We could be lost, sir. No one has ever returned from a mis-jump.”

  Benno slammed his palm down on his armrest. “Fine. Find me a drive destination that, at the very least, skirts the fleet’s position and is within appropriate range, with further access to Adelaide.”

  While he waited, Condition One watch standers assumed their General Quarters positions. The only ones missing were Chief Dufresne from her XO’s seat and CDR Ashton from the OOD position. The QM1 held onto OOD but did not take her place next to the seething Benno.

  So close. He had been so very, very close.

  “CO, TAO, we can try for HD 4391, uninhabited, about 6 light years away. It’s a trinary system, so the geodesics get a little weird, but it’s our best bet. It’ll take us within engagement range of the fleet, but north of the ecliptic. That close, though, I can make a jump that will get us in the ballpark after we get past system escape velocity.”

  Benno could hardly think. The longer he waited, the quicker his options lessened, and the closer he was to losing any chance of rescuing Mio.

  They could not wait for the dropship, whether it decided to turn around or not.

  “Navigator, TAO, this is the CO. Maneuver for jump to HD 4391. Keep us slightly off vector for as long as you can. I don’t want to give away where we’re going if I can avoid it. They’ll jump after us as soon as they can. Find options for working our way to Adelaide immediately after that. Execute!”

  They all jumped to the task. For his part, Benno’s eyes stayed glued to the tactical screen, splitting the differenc
e between the dropship, near the orbit of Morgan’s Rock, no longer closing but not yet turning around, and the rest of their former squadron, approaching their position.

  Acceleration pushed him down into his seat, one gravity, two gravities, three…

  “Puller, this is 757 Actual, Commodore Carter. Heave to and cut thrust. Power down all weapons systems and explain yourselves! When and why did you detach from Executive Amber? Why are you here? Why did you bring us here? What happened to Captain Palmer? Answer me, damn you, or be destroyed!”

  The Puller thrust on, and no one said anything.

  On the tactical screen, he saw their dropship with Chief Dufresne come back up to power and boost its acceleration to five Gs, then 10. Its acceleration vector became erratic, jinking back and forth, but the ship was too far away, and they didn’t have enough sensors aimed behind them to see much of what was going on.

  The single-stage-to-orbit dropship had an enormous amount of residual delta-v and a combat-worthy thrust to weight ratio. And Jason Pierce used every bit of it. Their instantaneous acceleration shifted around wildly, reversing, changing direction, then going off on another vector entirely. The jerks they felt must have been terrifying, unless they had passed out under the extreme forces. The evasive maneuvers had to be algorithmic and under autopilot control at this point. No living pilot could still have been conscious by then.

  And neither could any of the passengers. Benno took solace in that.

  The dropship suddenly fell to zero acceleration, and the sensors lost tracking on them. Instead, a multitude of new debris tracks blossomed from their last position. Something from Morgan’s Rock had shot them down. They were gone.

  Master at Arms Chief Ellen Dufresne would never see her brother and his kids again.

  Benno closed the window tracking her and turned his full attention to their own escape vector. Their path toward the HD 4391 transit entry lay before them like an angry red road. On the screen, five other tracks closed on theirs with furious intent. Those ships had relied upon them for defense only a few minutes ago. Now, they were the enemy. Or rather, Benno and his crew had been revealed as their enemy.

  None of the ships would reach them. They were too far out of position, caught unaware. But their weapons? Their combat reach? The math for that was unassailable. If the Puller was to escape, they would have to fly through space at the extreme edge of their former compatriots’ engagement envelopes. They could all see the cones of probable fire intersecting their path.

  They either had to surrender or make a run through the crucible.

  Eventually, the commodore stopped calling. Benno never answered. It was quiet on the bridge. They were accelerating too fast to make speech comfortable, and what was there to say? For everything to fail so quickly, so severely, when a smooth progression to victory had been right in their grasp…

  No one wanted to speak to him. Benno did not even want to speak to himself. He just wanted to wallow in self-recrimination, in doubts over Mio and Adelaide and the other worlds, in guilt over Dufresne, and even over the loyalists.

  As if operating on a timer, as soon as the engagement cones flashed green for permissive range, the other ships fired. Benno did not bother to order fire upon the shooters. Not only did he not want to shoot them, the Puller did not have enough ammo to fight the fleet and the incoming rounds, and still have some left for their actual mission. They could only defend and run.

  Missile hatches opened and disgorged a string of missiles at no set targets. They merely lanced out and exploded in maximal fusion fury, not bothering to convert their energy into xasers. Instead, they filled the engagement cones with active plasma and hard particle debris, fuzzing and cluttering tactical screens just as the opposing ships’ warheads passed through the chaff. The Puller maneuvered as much as she could, while staying within her entry vectors for transit.

  Some warheads died, others activated and exploded, wasting their radiation or their xaser beams on empty space. But not all, not when every other Alliance ship poured all their remaining fire into the Puller’s path.

  Laser mounts snapped and PDCs chattered. Railgun mounts jumped again and again and again, chewing apart the torrent inbound to them. The TAO even activated their IFF transponder, desperately trying to convince the hastily-fired weapons they were friendly, but they took out only the smallest portion.

  Railgun rounds hit first, their straight trajectories outpacing the maneuvering missile warheads, even if those weapons operated at the speed of light once within terminal engagement range. The Puller shook as fragmentary rounds exploded and peppered her forward and aft hulls, her radiators, and her antennas and weapons. The destroyer shuddered as unitary penetrators tore apart the double hull and breached the pressure hull. Unlike the previous General Quarters, there had been little time to prep. Not all the crew was in their vacuum armor.

  Benno was not. He just waited for a breach in the pressure boundary of the bridge. If that happened, all he had done for Mio was for nothing.

  Fusion explosions rippled again and again in the spaces between the Puller and the Libertad and her escort ships. This time, they were for their intended purpose. Fusion energy channeled down into lasing media and created coherent laser light just before the lasing medium vaporized. Shafts of x-ray laser light speared outward. Not all intersected with the Puller, but enough did.

  The ship shuddered, leaped, and shook as perfect cylinders of invisible brilliance burned themselves straight through the ship, before excitation energy, thermal shock, plasma, and scattered x-ray photons exploded outward from each path of penetration. Some were like those the Annapolis used on them—narrow but devastating. Others, however, were like the Dauphine capital-class warhead that had first cored them, back before everything fell apart.

  Entire spaces were vaporized, along with their equipment, their personnel, their cableways, and their data trunks. Explosions rocked the Puller, as if she was inundated by continuous nuclear torches. System statuses leaped right past yellow or orange, straight to red, then flashed, undefined, as they no longer registered.

  At last, the engines cut out. All acceleration vanished. The ship was in freefall. The only boon was that the rounds aimed further along their predicted path, which assumed their acceleration remained high, all missed.

  The ship became deceptively quiet. No more explosions or rounds battered the ship. Even the various urgent alarms had been squelched.

  Benno looked to his screens. Their images fuzzed and leaped, flashing into and out of existence, but when they briefly stabilized, he saw they were aligned, vector achieved. Did that assessment include all the side vectors and pushes the attacks upon them imparted? Were the astrometrics even accurate after taking so much damage? If he hit initiate, would they wind up in trinary system HD 4391, or would they wind up far, far away, in another system, in another galaxy, lost forever?

  “CO, TAO, sir, the Libertad is adjusting fire. Weapons inbound in thirty-seven seconds.”

  Benno pressed the icon on his screen.

  The Puller vanished in a flash of gravity waves and blue Cerenkov radiation, destination unknown.

  * * * * *

  Chapter Eighteen: Mio

  Mio couldn’t believe her eyes. There stood Dan, talking with the Terran soldiers like they were the best of friends. Dan was the traitor. After several seconds of contemplation, though, it made sense. Dan had been on all the missions that had gone badly, and even though he’d been hurt, he was the only other person to survive the food warehouse raid besides Mio. It all made perfect sense, in retrospect.

  She slid away from the firethorn bush and crawled back into the tunnel. Harry was already there, picking up his rifle.

  “I can’t believe it,” Mio muttered, gathering her gear, “and yet I can. He was perfectly placed to do the most damage to our cause. I just don’t understand why he would do it, though.”

  “No way to tell without asking him,” Harry said. “I’m sure he’s got his reasons, and t
hey must be good ones if they were important enough to lead his friends to their deaths.”

  “And what could those possibly be?”

  “No idea.”

  Mio shook her head, trying to get rid of the image of Dan talking to the troopers. “Are you ready to go?” she asked. “We have to get back with the news.”

  “I am,” Harry replied. “I saw everything I needed. That’s a BF-19 Sky Shrike surface-to-space missile system, which is the follow-on system to the BF-17 system I used to operate. It’s an extremely capable system, a fleet-killer. While the Terrans have access to it, your father doesn’t have a chance of returning to the planet. Not alive, anyway.”

  “So, we have to do something about it if I ever want to see my father again.”

  “Yes.”

  “What do we need to do?”

  “Missile systems are tricky,” Harry said. “They have a lot of components, and all of them have to work right for the system to function as planned. The key to it all, though, is the command van. That’s what controls the missiles and passes them the information their guidance systems need to hit their targets. Without the guidance info, the missiles are just rockets that are going to go somewhere and blow up, but they’re far more likely to miss than they are to hit. If you can get me into the command and control vehicle, I might be able to make it work. Might.”

  “Why wouldn’t you be able to?”

  “Any number of reasons. Maybe the radars aren’t working. Maybe the orbital datalinks are bad. Maybe the controls will be damaged in the fighting. Who knows? Maybe it’s as simple as whether they’ve changed the password.”

  “The password?”

  “Sure, you need a password to operate the system. The thing is, the system comes with a default password, and most crews never change it.”

  “Really? That sounds dumb.”

  “Well, look at it this way. Why would you expect an enemy to capture it? Besides, there are several people who need access to the system. Every time you change the password, you need to make sure everyone knows, which can be a hassle.”