Rodrigues stood and pulled his heavy rifle from the ceiling rack. Like you said, General, they’re former members of the 538. The unit’s gone; hell, most of the officers snuck back to their rich families after Irricana. The 538 stopped existing years ago when Seneca and Kinsey got their greasy claws into us, and I’m done helping the Grays.”
Armstead stood as well. “We finally found ourselves a good officer,” he told her. “Not about to back out now, just because those guys out there have the same number stenciled on their armor as us.” He pulled down a rifle.
Paul stood and hauled down his own rifle. “The 488 stands with you, General,” he told her with a mischievous grin.
“I’d say it does more than just stand with the general, unless I miss my guess,” Rodrigues ventured with a chuckle.
“Hah!” Julia gave the man a comradely shove. “Been too long since you’ve seen any ‘action’, Marine?”
Rodrigues beamed at the compliment. It was the first time she’d referred to him as a Marine.
It was a calculated effort on Julia’s part. She’d actually been waiting for the chance to work that term into the conversation. Even more than the attack on the Purist Gray cruiser, she would be placing her life in the hands of two relative unknowns. Their loyalties would come under greater strain when coming up against former comrades.
They were sick of their long history of questionable service, of that much she was certain. The trick lay in breaking them down and rebuilding them to her own standards, and she had precious little time for it.
They’d had several days of being ex-Marines, a term of less-than-honorable connotation. They’d done well during the boarding of the Gray ships, but it wasn’t really enough to wipe out their past.
Still, Julia didn’t have a lot of time to bring them along. Members of their old unit were just outside the shuttle and they might need killing.
Her HUD went from sleep mode to full illumination, telling her that the fleet was now jamming the station. No signals would get in or out until they were ready.
“That’s going to raise the alarm!” She closed her helmet. “Let’s go, boys!”
She hit the release on the rear ramp and moved to the end, stepping off when it was still a meter away from the deck. She waited until the other three formed up on her before marching around the corner of the shuttle to approach the two armored guards.
The two guards had their helmets retracted. They weren’t expecting trouble from Marines, after all; the only ones in the sector were there for the same purpose.
“What’s going on?” the man on the left asked. “We heard nothing about this.” His eyes widened in shock as he looked past Julia.
Assuming he’d seen Dem firing his weapon, she drew her sidearm and fired three rounds into his face. The man to her right died in a similar fashion as Rodrigues blasted his head all over the door and bulkheads.
A crashing sound echoed through the station, followed by a pressure alarm.
Her assumption had apparently been correct. Dem had just taken the control room out of the equation by firing a heavy round through the lower right frame of its glazing. The shot had been close enough to damage one of the shield emitters and smash a window, causing a catastrophic decompression.
Without a word, she led Rodrigues and Armstead to the central companionway and into the nearest riser. They worked their way up two decks, emerging into the grav-zone with heavy thuds. She turned right and approached the two Marines guarding the door to the communications center. With the alarm sounding, their helmets were closed up.
There was no need to seize the entire station, which housed more than a quarter million people. This was a straight-up lightning raid. Get aboard, seize the communications center, and send the kill-switch signal.
These guards were a little more on the ball. Despite the Marine armor, they were unwilling to simply trust the approaching strangers. Their heavy weapons came up.
Before Julia could do anything, Rodrigues retracted his helmet.
He gestured at the weapons. “Is this because you owe me money, Garfield?” he asked with a good-natured grin.
The man on the left retracted his helmet. “George! You son of a bitch! I thought you got your ration chip punched on Roanoke after that inspector caught up with you.” His eyebrows dropped in the middle. “How did you get away from that, anyway?”
“The inspector let me and Army, here, go,” he replied, jerking a thumb over his shoulder at Armstead. “Turns out he’s an old hand from the 488. Decent guy, too.”
“So what’s the deal with you?” Garfield turned his weapon away from the four interlopers, still a hand on the pistol grip but pointing it to his left.
“General Urbica was looking for a couple of good men,” Rodrigues told him, “but she was willing to settle for us.”
“Urbica?” the other guard exclaimed through his external speakers. “That Zhan Dark?” He raised his weapon a fraction. “Why are we even wasting our time talking to these guys? They’re working for the enemy!”
Garfield had evidently been expecting the outburst. He merely slid his weapon a little farther to his left and up under the lower abdominal plate of his fellow guard.
Julia had barely registered the sudden, subtle movement before the weapon went off, tearing the fixatropic inter-plate armor loose from its upper seam and allowing entry to a burst of heavy rounds.
“Some folks you just can’t talk to,” Garfield told them, “and Gunny Fitch, here, was one of ’em.”
Fitch’s suit slumped slightly before returning to a standing position mimicking Garfield’s movements.
“Old bastard had a one-track mind and it just ran in the same small circle, hour after hour.” Garfield shook his head. “Just like that mustang we had to frag on Iceland Station.”
“Yeah, I remember him,” Rodrigues replied. “We thought he’d turn out to be a good officer, but he ended up trying to outdo the aristos for stupidity.” He raised an eyebrow at Garfield. “You want to fight for Humans for a change?”
A nod. “You need in here?”
Julia retracted her helmet. “Yes, we do. We need to send a signal from that room.”
Garfield nodded. This being a tactical situation, he knew better than to salute or come to attention. “Well, ma’am, the door is on a time-lock and only opens at shift change.” He handed his weapon to Rodrigues. “Supposed to be impenetrable. Thankfully, the team that set this place up were just a bunch of techies.”
He closed up his helmet and threw himself at the wall to the right of the door. The carbon-foam panel shattered and he stumbled into the communications room.
Julia led her group through the large hole, shouting at the seven operators inside to step away from their consoles. Unsurprisingly, all of them went for their sidearms. Julia had already covered the possibility with her small insertion team but Garfield was a new addition. She reached out to push his weapon down.
Garfield’s frown turned to a look of comprehension as the communications techs all killed themselves. “Gods!” he breathed. “That’ll give a man nightmares, watching people shoot themselves against their own will…”
“At least they were using Humans in here.” Paul pulled a corpse out of a chair and then uprooted the chair itself so he could kneel in front of the console. In his HMA suit, he was too heavy for the flimsy console chair. “Otherwise, we’d have had to shoot at Grays and risk damaging the equipment.”
He ran through the menus. “Here’s the outbound signal directory,” he muttered absently.
Julia knew that tone. He was using his CPU to interface with the system. His banter was just cover for those who knew nothing of his implants.
“Here we are!” He enlarged the screen and dragged it up to a place in the middle of the room.
The group gathered in front of it.
Paul pointed up at the lines. “Look at that.”
Julia wrinkled her nose. “It’s the shutdown signal, alright, but why would they
also send the current known dispositions of all forces on both sides?”
“Jian gui!” Paul exclaimed. “Do you remember what N’Zim said? Sending this signal represented a failure in their efforts against the Imperium.”
Julia looked at him for a moment, head tilted, and then her eyes grew wide. “Wǒ de mā!” she whispered. “This civil war keeps the sector from being a threat to their rear, leaving them free to take on the Imperium. If we send this signal, it starts unraveling the conflict…”
“And the colonies become a threat they have to deal with,” Paul finished for her. “That’s why the signal carries intel on dispositions.” He pointed at the lines of code. “And it builds on that intel as the signal hops from ship to ship. The Grays would be able to wipe out our forces in a matter of days.”
“If we send this,” she affirmed, “the Grays go to war with us.”
“Why wouldn’t they just do that to start with?” Armstead asked. “It’s not like we’d be hard to wipe out.”
“The colonies would fall quickly enough,” Julia agreed, “but they’ve got to be wondering what would happen if word got back to the Imperium. They’ve got to know there’s some limited communication, so if the news got out about Billions of Humans being massacred by Grays, there’d be a full-scale war.”
“And the Grays’ idea of taking on the Imperium,” Paul added, “is exploiting weak-points through Human proxies like Seneca. It nearly worked at Irricana and Santa Clara. The last thing they want right now is a straight-up fight with the Imperium.”
“We can’t send this signal,” Julia insisted, a mix of anger and relief flooding over her. At least they wouldn’t have thousands of deaths on their hands. “Even if we could scrub out the tactical data, the Grays would still come to wipe us all out.”
“As soon as they see the footage from this station and realize we were here,” Paul warned, “they’ll come anyway.” He turned back to the control holo. “I think we can erase the records.”
Julia nodded absently but suddenly stopped and grabbed his shoulder. “Just the internal sensors and radio signals for the last twenty minutes,” she suggested. “Let them have the external video but no registry data.”
He grinned. “They’re going to wonder who smashed their way in here. I’ll bet they blame the Purists, since those are mostly their ships anyway.”
“It still leaves us without our knockout punch,” Julia groused. “The fleet is going to be seriously pissed. We promised them an end to the war.”
“And an end to prize money,” he reminded her. “By now, some of them are probably wondering what they’ll do for a living once the war ends. They might be willing to forgive us.”
He turned away from the interface. “The sensor data’s scrubbed and we have a deca-day to clear out of here.”
Thomas closed up the back ramp as soon as the last passenger was aboard. Julia strapped in next to him as they cleared the station’s atmo shield. “Is the signal ready to go?”
Julia turned to him, lips drawn tight and her face grim. “The kill signal doesn’t just wipe out the conditioned forces,” she explained. “It also tells the Grays they need to come wipe us out before resuming their meddling with the Imperium.”
“Are you phasing me?”
“No, I wish I were.”
“Then there’s no signal going out?” Thomas ran a quick check of his controls. “We came here for nothing? The crews will crucify us for this. Fall’s probably already planning mischief but he’ll upgrade it to a full revolt.”
Julia sighed, staring out the front window at the fleet of formerly Purist warships. Suddenly a small smile played around the corners of her mouth.
“We may have come away with something much better than we originally planned,” she replied obscurely. She immediately wished she hadn’t said anything because Thomas’ resulting stream of questions distracted her from a careful examination of the possible angles.
Still, she had the nucleus of a good plan.
Purists
Julia checked the power source estimates on the three singularity generators. They should keep running for another day, at the least. She was just keeping herself busy, which is why she hated ambushes. She had no idea when a Gray convoy might pass by so they might find themselves in action at any given moment.
Or it might drag out long enough that they’d have to create a few new artificial singularities.
She was in the newer cruiser, along with two destroyers that the Grays would identify as belonging to the Purist faction, and they were sitting just outside the Goat’s Head nebula. The Ava Klum was too easily recognized as belonging to Humans and so she’d had to leave it behind at the rendezvous point. Her gaze drifted across the tactical holo to the dense blue haze that represented the goat’s horn.
It was funny how the universe always seemed to bring you full circle. She smiled, giving her head a tiny shake. She was back here because her first visit had lodged the idea in her mind, not because of some great universal intelligence.
The Purists had been found here, waiting to do the same thing… more or less. N’Zim had accused them of wanting to wipe out their prey entirely in order to get them talking. Julia had realized N’Zim was on the right path.
It was time for the Purists to ratchet up their campaign if they wanted to be taken seriously. Simply disabling a few ships was a waste of time. Destroying them… that would send a message that the ‘Purists’ were serious.
She recalled an earlier discussion about how the Grays had used a small cadre of conditioned Humans to sow dissent among the colonies, and she drew her lips back in anticipation.
The Grays were playing a dangerous game, considering they had a small group of highly motivated dissenters within their own ranks.
“Distortion alert,” the sensor officer announced. “Multiple tumble vectors. Resolving two cruisers, eight destroyers and eighteen transports.” He turned to look at Hale. “That’s just a little more company than we were expecting.”
The display was entirely in green-scale. This fight was going to take place in the nebula and it would have been distracting to switch from optical-enhanced to radio sensing in the middle of a fight.
“Captain Hale, set the assault group to weapons free,” Julia ordered. “We came to make a statement. The bigger the better. Let’s hit ’em before they get their pitch drives spooled up.”
A sound like a high-speed train rumbled under the decking and two black lines streaked away from the front of the captured Purist cruiser. A host of thinner but faster lines overtook them, accompanied by a higher-pitched humming that reached the bridge from varying directions.
Another deep rumble tickled at her feet and two more heavy streaks made their way toward the enemy.
“Rounds complete,” the weapons officer announced, turning to face Hale and Julia. “The Eldritch and the Corbesier report the same.”
“Very well.” Hale nodded to the helmsman. “We’ve got their attention. Time to see if they want to play hide-and-seek. Take us back into the horn. Comms, send the recall.”
“Reading EM spikes from the enemy warships,” the sensor officer announced.
“Mind that return fire,” the navigation officer warned his operator. “Whether they’re of a mind to chase us or not, they won’t say no to a chance to put a round or two up our fleeing backsides.”
As if to prove him right, the helmsman shifted them to port as a tight grouping of streaks streamed past to starboard. The cruiser was nimble for a ship its size, but she was no Mary Starbuck when it came to dodging enemy fire. A single round from an enemy’s secondary armament screamed its way down the starboard side, converting itself to vapor as it tore its way through the carbon, titanium and ceramics of the Gray warship’s flank.
“We’re still operational,” the damage control officer – one of Paul’s protégés – announced. “Ammunition conveyors are knocked out for half the starboard batteries, but the damaged compartments have sealed automaticall
y. Estimating fifteen dead based on the station bill.”
“Can we repair those conveyers?” Hale asked. He leaned slightly to the left as the view of the nebula slid sharply to port. Another set of streaks raced quietly by.
“I’ve got two teams heading in there in EVA suits right now,” the damage controller assured him. “Plus three more to see what we can do about the secondary life support conduits. Might be needing those before this is over.”
Paul had been adamant about ‘educating’ their damage control officers and his efforts were starting to bear fruit. Of course, they’d needed to create the positions first, then wait for the crews to elect candidates into them.
Julia stepped a little closer to the central holo. Half-lit green icons representing the original position of the ten enemy warships each had a line leading to a fully lit icon and the distance was growing rapidly. “They’re coming after us.”
“No hits from our opening salvo,” the sensor officer announced.
She looked to the red icon. The Grays, with green blood, used green as the color for alarm, emergency or enemy. They used red as their safe signal or to represent friendly forces.
The red icons, representing the Human-controlled ‘Purist’ force of one cruiser and two destroyers, were just entering the outer fringes of the goat’s horn. Now every passing moment would render them more indistinct to the enemy.
“Take the assault group through the ‘ring’, Captain,” she ordered, “but keep the enemy in sight.”
This would be a tricky business. They wanted to be followed, but that meant they had to endure enemy fire until they could spring the trap. If they simply melted away then the enemy might just give up and, even worse, they wouldn’t obligingly follow them through the recently created gravimetric ring caused earlier when a Gray destroyer had detonated its self-destruct weapon within the nebula.
Beyond the Rim (Rebels and Patriots Book 2) Page 24
