Beyond the Rim (Rebels and Patriots Book 2)

by A. G. Claymore

  Not many miners’ sons could say they’d executed a Grand Senator.

  The pods began to drop to the deck and spring open. For the crewmen aboard, it was somewhat anticlimactic. They almost invariably exited their small boarding craft with weapons at the ready, but they quickly realized the large space had already been taken by their new captain and her companion.

  Paul waved his heavy rifle. “Any electrician’s mates, raise your hands.”

  Five hands went up and he picked two of them, choosing not to use their names. He could easily read their citizenship chips with a quick scan, but he knew it would seem false to them.

  “Any engineering ratings or officers?” He ended up picking another two, but that still left him with only five men to take the engineering compartment. He saw Dem standing next to two women.

  “Dem,” he called out. His was a name he could use because they’d already met. “What’s your rating?”

  “Weapons tech,” Dem replied with a nod to his two crewmates. “Sher and Carol too.”

  “Good!” Paul enthused, taking care not to explain that it was their lack of a bridge specialty that had sparked his enthusiasm. Julia wouldn’t need them to take over control of the ship once the bridge was cleared. Paul simply needed them to come along and shoot Grays.

  “We’re going aft to seize the engineering compartments so we can disconnect the self-destruct charge.” He waved a hand at Dem’s dubious expression. “We have the schematics.”

  He led his small group through the large portal at the aft end of the hangar and down the broad companionway running the length of the ship. As he expected, the heaviest resistance was concentrated in key points while the interior was largely neglected.

  The Grays had acknowledged the need for better security on their ships, but they’d had little time to learn the specialty from their traitorous Human co-conspirators. With Seneca and his troops now removed from Gray contact, they were making it up as they went along.

  It was rumored they didn’t really have much in the way of infantry, having relied on their qualitative edge in ship construction for thousands of years. Their idea of seizing a planet consisted of achieving orbital superiority and then bombarding the planet into submission.

  The first Gray they found was four hundred meters aft of the forward hangar. He’d rounded the corner of an intersection ahead of Paul’s small team and fell to a hail of small arms fire.

  Paul raced to the center of the intersection and found three more Grays, all unarmed, running away. He dropped them all. Though they didn’t carry weapons, they’d surely try any number of measures to stop the Human intruders.

  If they couldn’t activate the self-destruct, they’d vent the hallway to kill off the mostly unsuited boarding party.

  Three hundred meters farther along, they came to the main hatch to the engineering spaces. When it slid open, Paul took the lead, letting the rest of his team gain the benefit of his dragoon armor.

  The self-destruct was centrally located and he saw a small knot of Grays huddled around it. He began putting short bursts into each of them, moving quickly in an attempt to prevent his fellow crewmen from firing at anything near the nuclear device.

  Fortunately, they were already busy firing at other Grays and he realized he’d been a little unfair. This was obviously not their first boarding party. They took great care to aim at each target, damaging not a single critical system as they did so.

  “We’re clear, Paul,” Dem shouted.

  “Dem, take Sher and Carol with you,” Paul replied. “Find every hatch leading into this compartment and keep eyes on them.” He opened his helmet, now that the shooting was done.

  “Tinkers and sparkies on me,” he called out, pointing at the large bomb mounted on a central pedestal. He walked over and pulled a dead Gray off the assembly and dropped him to the side.

  He set his CPU to upload the translated interface developed by one of Julia’s dragoons. The holo display above the bomb flickered and switched to Imperial Standard. “Aiya bù hǎo!” He cursed softly as he looked over at his small technical team.

  “I think the appropriate phrase for this,” he intoned darkly, “rhymes with clucking bell.”

  ***

  Julia was approaching the bridge at the head of her small group. Most of them had bridge ratings and she was reasonably certain they’d be enough to run the cruiser. Despite their apparent lack of discipline and their disorganized attitude toward damage control, the privateers weren’t so slack that they didn’t extensively cross-train their crews.

  It stood to reason, since they liked boarding enemy vessels so much. She kept her helmet sealed. It provided her senses with an advantage and, frankly, she was the shield for her team. She reached the final turn and stepped out into the main companionway.

  An armored guard post sat on either side of the bridge portal. That was a new development since she’d boarded that cruiser in Irricanan orbit. The Grays might make tactical mistakes, but they rarely make the same mistake twice.

  She suddenly felt an intense debilitating fear. Her legs might have given out had she not been wearing an HMA suit. She’d never believed in ghosts, but she suddenly felt certain she was facing something supernatural. It faded before she could even put words to her thoughts and she saw a blinking icon on her HUD.

  The Grays were using infrasound. They were immune to the effects but Humans tended to exhibit the exact symptoms Julia had felt until her suit’s central processor identified the threat and nullified it.

  She brought her weapon up and aimed for the firing slots on the left hand guard post. The sudden upward tilt of the enemy weapon barrel indicated she’d scored a hit and she shifted to the right hand post, keeping up a cover fire as she advanced on the position.

  She didn’t have to look behind her to know she had no backup. The sound was still active and she knew her team would be helpless. She swerved to stop in front of the left hand post to fire into the unarmored side of the right hand one. Two Grays went down and she began shifting aim at a new target in front of the post when she realized it was one of her own.

  “Robin?”

  Robin put a short burst into the left hand guard post before looking across to Julia. “They stole the idea of infrasonic weapons from us,” she explained. “Some of us aren’t affected by it.”

  Julia nodded toward the bridge portal. “Take your time, aim carefully and don’t shoot the equipment.” She stepped over to one of the dead guards and grabbed the body by the wrist, dragging it over to the door.

  She caught Robin’s eye. “Start from the port side, I’ll start from starboard. Ready?”

  Robin nodded, her assault rifle tight into her shoulder.

  Julia pressed the still-warm hand to a panel by the door and then dropped the body as the heavy door receded into the wall with alarming speed. She brought her weapon up and swung it to the right.

  The first Gray went down without even realizing the danger. The next two saw the danger but died at their posts. By the time she shifted to the fourth target, the crew were trying to take cover.

  “Stay at this hatch and cover me,” Julia ordered. She moved quickly around the starboard side of the bridge and then worked her way over to the port side. A weapons officer made a brave but ultimately doomed attempt to fire at her but his light sidearm was too feeble to penetrate Marine armor.

  Robin put the clone down and Julia reached the shield control station where the last of the bridge crew had been taking cover.

  The clone stood, looking up at her with what appeared to be extreme disdain, but it was hard to tell, given the disparity in height, whether there was any subtext in the tilt of his head.

  “You will soon find that…”

  Julia cut him off in mid drone by bringing an armored fist down on his head. She wondered how many millennia of accumulated memory she’d just erased forever, but she kept moving.

  She jogged over to the main control station and established a link, uploadin
g the translation algorithm that a young dragoon from an old trading family had developed. The screens flickered and then switched to Imperial Standard.

  She waved her hand, opening a new control holo, and found the Ship Security menu. A green icon was labeled Sonic Defense and she reached out to touch it. With the Grays, active weapon icons were colored green, their standard color of danger or alarm. Just as Humans used red for emergency buttons, the Grays used green to reflect the color of their copper based blood.

  ***

  Paul opened his helmet as the feeling of dread subsided. He rubbed the sweat out of his eyes. His HUD had been able to tell him that an infrasonic weapon was in use but he’d been too gripped by the effects to notice. His light dragoon armor might give him more mobility than HMA but it did have a few disadvantages and the ability to counteract sound-based weapons was obviously one of them.

  He grabbed the nearest engineer’s mate and pulled him back to his feet. “Come on,” he urged. “We don’t have much time left.” He moved around the self-destruct pedestal, chivying his small tech team back into action.

  He pointed out the various connections and emphasized the correct sequence before letting them start. Watching them closely, he opened a channel to Julia and the Mary Starbuck.

  “It’s Grimm, down in engineering,” he announced. “The self-destruct’s been activated using a manual override. The suppressor field on the Mary Starbuck isn’t required anymore so they can move away from us if needed.

  “Captain Urbica, we’re working to cut the destruct module loose but I’m going to need you to kill the override on the external hatches. If we can remove this, we’re only gonna have a few milli-days left on the countdown, so I need the ventral hatch open and ready.”

  ***

  Julia backed out to the main defensive menu and found the hull penetration controls. Given how pressed they were for time, she was glad she’d had several months aboard her stolen Sucker Punch to familiarize herself with Gray system architecture.

  She deactivated the hatch locks and opened the ventral hatch that Paul was planning to use. Breathing a sigh of relief, she turned her gaze back to the tactical display.

  A naughty smile played across her features.

  Her team was now coming onto the bridge, having recovered from the effects of the infrasonic weapon. “Stations!” she snapped. “Robin, get on the helm and turn our belly to the three destroyers. Get us in close enough to touch shields with the middle one.”

  ***

  “No, dammit!” Paul pulled an electrician’s mate back from the deadly explosive device. “Disconnect the red one first, then the green.” He pulled him back over. “It’ll blow up if you do it backwards.”

  Eyes wide, the young man reached back in, activating the brownian generator on his wrist. He gave the small implement a moment to liquify the sealant in the coupling before turning the locking collar. It slid off easily.

  He moved to the final connection, the ‘blood’ colored green one and repeated the process. “Ok,” the electrical rating muttered. “It’s more than two hundred kilos so we’ll have to…”

  Paul shouldered him aside and, using the strength of his armor, easily lifted the still-active bomb from the mounting points. He raced over to the recently opened hatch in the floor and looked outside, the bomb held high over his head.

  He laughed out loud when he saw the hull of a destroyer just a hundred meters away. “One of the many reasons I love that woman,” he said under his breath. He shoved the bomb assembly toward the enemy hull with all his might.

  The weapon seemed to move with incredible slowness but he knew it was just an optical illusion, amplified by the danger it represented. He saw the blue flash that indicated the bomb had travelled the first forty meters and cleared the cruiser’s combat shield.

  “The ship is safe,” he announced over the open channel. “I’d recommend backing us off.”

  The segments of the enemy hull plating started shrinking as the cruiser backed away. The second blue haze proved the wisdom of Julia’s burst of inspiration. “It’s inside the enemy shield.”

  Now that the stress of imminent vaporization was eliminated, events seemed to slow down.

  “Huh!” Dem grunted, looking out at the shrinking enemy ship. Its two cohorts now showed on either flank and they’d stayed close together to provide mutual fire support against the Humans. “Thought we were in some kind of rush to get that thing out of here.”

  Paul was using his helmet to magnify the image and he shrugged as the bomb bounced off the destroyer’s hull. “Maybe it’s a dud?” He turned to Dem, luckily, as the weapon finally went off.

  Dem raised a hand to shield his eyes. Combat shielding protected against radiation as well as blinding levels of light, but it still wasn’t very smart to actually stare at a nuke.

  In Paul’s case, it would have been downright idiotic, at high magnification, to be looking right at it. Sometimes he wondered how he’d managed to stay alive this long.

  He looked back out after his view reset on Dem’s face. The blast had filled the limits of the destroyer’s shield, trapping the force and bouncing it back against the hull, eating its way in through the weak points until a tendril of vaporized metal and plasma reached the main power couple and the ship went dead.

  The shields, bereft of energy, gave up the ghost and two hundred megatons of destructive power were released in a growing sphere that engulfed the remaining two destroyers on either side.

  “That should buy us some breathing room,” Paul offered mildly.

  ***

  “Quiet on the bridge!” Julia shouted. The crew were understandably pleased, having avoided destruction in a manner that took out at least one enemy ship, but they needed to keep their heads on straight.

  “Mary Starbuck, make best possible speed for clear space and jump,” she ordered. “We’ll follow you out.”

  “Only another five hundred kilometers, Captain,” her helmsman advised. “We’ll be clear in no time.

  “Very well,” she replied. “Keep us between the Mary Starbuck and the enemy and follow her out.”

  She turned back to the tactical holo. The energy cloud was dissipating and it revealed two heavily damaged destroyers. Both had large pieces of the destroyed vessel embedded in their hulls and long linear sections of hull had been scorched and melted where the blast had forced its way in through shield junctions.

  They were also several kilometers away from their pre-blast positions. The sudden lateral movement was almost certainly enough to overload the vessels’ inertial dampening systems.

  “Should we finish them off?” Hale asked.

  Julia gave it a moment’s thought. Hale had come because his own weapons had been knocked out. It almost seemed unfair to refuse him but fairness rarely had a place in combat.

  She shook her head. “No, Hale, we’d have to come about to bring the main guns to bear and I’d rather use that time to get us clear of this mess.” She nodded at the display. “I’d be surprised if the crews survived that blast anyway. Look how far they got thrown.”

  Hale nodded. “I was trying to suppress the same thought.” He offered her a lame smile. “I let my desire for revenge get the better of me.”

  “It happens,” Julia told him, letting him off his own hook. “Let’s just get the ship to Roanoke before something else tumbles out of distortion on us.” She tilted her head, chewing on the inside of her lip for a moment.

  “We need to give her a name,” she muttered. “Can’t keep calling her the ship, now can we?”

  Robin turned from the helm station. “How about the Ava Klum?”

  Julia nodded noncommittally. “Not bad. She a friend of yours?”

  Robin frowned. “Well, no. She’s a pretty famous captain out of Roanoke and, from the way we heard Inspector Grimm talking about you on the open channel – you know, when he threw the nuke out the ventral hatch – we figure Ava’s the closest thing to family you’ve got out here.”

/>   “Mary Starbucks clear and bending space for Roanoke,” the communications officer announced.

  Julia stared at the back of Robin’s head as the helmswoman prepared for the jump. The heat behind her ears was back. They’d all heard him say he loved her, no doubt forgetting in the heat of the moment that his channel was still open.

  Robin’s last few words finally burned through the embarrassment. “What do you mean, family?”

  “Oh hells!” Hale turned back to look at her, a strange look on his face. “It’s so easy to forget that we hear everything about the Imperium, but nobody there has any idea we even exist. Of course you wouldn’t know…”

  “We just cleared the singularity generators,” Robin called out. “Bending space for Roanoke.”

  Lost Colonies

  Dropping In

  Paul leaned forward, waiting for the plasma burst to clear. He knew the gesture wouldn’t improve his view of Roanoke in the slightest, but he’d spent the last fifteen hours in a fog of disbelief and that fog was about to be lifted. Hatteras station was directly ahead.

  The bridge windows finally returned to full transparency and the massive wheel of Hatteras was visible.

  “Hail them,” Julia ordered immediately. “They’re bound to be a little jumpy, seeing a Gray cruiser flash in right next to them.”

  She rolled her eyes at Paul as the channel opened to reveal a panicked chatter coming from multiple sources. She held up a hand to forestall the communications officer. “Hatteras Station,” she began calmly, “the captured Gray cruiser in your zone of control is the Ava Klum, out of Roanoke, or she will be once we have her registered, over.”

  “Roger that, Ava Klum,” a professional voice cut through the chatter. “Approach between buoy delta-fife-six-niner and delta-fife-seven-zero. Take up holding position at charlie-fife-niner-niner, ventral on. Standby to receive clearance inspection team, Hatteras Station out.”

  “We’ll have to finish the inspection before we can go to the station.” Julia looked at Paul and almost laughed at his expression. “You’re the one who insisted on joining the boarding party,” she reminded him. “Crew on the Mary Starbuck don’t have to wait for an inspection since this is their home port.”