Warpath

by Randolph Lalonde

“Yes,” Henrietta said without a hint of doubt in her tone. “I have been able to confirm everything the Triton AI and this defector are saying with our scan data.”

  “All right,” Oz said. He turned to communications. “We’ve got our prisoner then. Notify all forces that they are not to be fired upon unless they open fire. They are our prisoners. We’ll take physical control of their shuttle when we’ve gotten distance from the Pontos.” He turned the channel to the gunship back on. “Pilot, you are clear to pass through our space and join us on the other side of Kambis. Stay close to the Triton, do not arm weapons. We will perform boarding operations as soon as we’re clear of this situation.”

  “Thank you, Admiral,” replied the pilot. The channel closed.

  The main tactical display on the bridge made it clear that the entire Triton Fleet, including the Barricade, was in retreat along with the British Alliance. Most of the Order of Eden carrier group were too damaged to make good speed out of the system, but one destroyer was able to make it into a wormhole as soon as the Barricade’s interdiction systems were turned away from it.

  “Any word on how the Warlord crew’s boarding operation is going? What am I seeing here?” Oz asked as he focused in on an image of the Warlord lightly colliding with the side of an Order of Eden Battlecruiser.

  “Captain Valent converted his ship into an antimatter bomb,” Agameg said. “So once it struck the side of that vessel, the Eternity, it would clamp on with the maxjack and explode like a focused charge. The Eternity, the Blessed Mission and the Redeemer Three, the main combat carrier all opened fire on the Warlord with directed electromagnetic pulse beams before it could complete its task, so it will not explode. The antimatter containment fail safes are in place, and the Warlord is now empty and relatively harmless.”

  “That’s something I never thought I’d hear. The Warlord: empty and relatively harmless,” Victor said. “I sent Captain Valent a message about our new problem. He tells me they will be able to take control of the Blessed Mission and get her out of the way in time.”

  “That’s insane. Recall all fighters and order the gunships to move to the other side of the planet,” Oz said. “What can our shields do to protect us against the blast?”

  “We’re working on that math right now,” Henrietta said hurriedly. “Let me guess, you want to know if you can move the Triton in right here,” she highlighted a spot on the map in front of the Blessed Mission, seemingly far from the Pontos on the tactical map. “Then charge up our shields to protect it.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Nope, not going to work,” Henrietta said, shaking her head. “That blast is going to be way too hot. If this second planet burner has as much antimatter as the first, then there’s no way.”

  “Jake,” Oz said, opening a direct channel. “You have to get that ship into a wormhole, you have about eight minutes, maybe less.”

  Chapter 20

  Rushing The Blessed Mission

  Jake fired all four barrels of his short rifle at the blast doors in front of him. The gel loads covered a two metre wide section and filled the hallway with white light as it began burning through the metal. “Working on getting to the bridge now. Any advice you could offer would be appreciated.”

  “Do you think you’ll make it?” Oz asked.

  Jake looked to Ayan, who was scanning the door as the gel burned through. “That’ll take ninety three seconds to get through,” she said. “There will be soldiers on the other side.”

  “Any way around?” Jake asked as he looked at his tactical display. Their scans of the ship were complete, but that offered little comfort as he realized that there was no way around that bulkhead.

  “No,” Minh-Chu said from behind him. “Dent and I already did some stealthed recon. This whole front section of the ship is closed off, and this door is the thinnest point.”

  Ayan gave him a brief hug. “What are you doing here?”

  “Someone left the front door wide open and we were out of ammo, so I thought we’d visit,” Minh-Chu said. “The whole Samurai Squadron is stealthing around looking for a place for a hull buster Sticky had. Bad time?”

  The hallway shook as heavy weapons fire announced the progress of Alaka’s team. Jake looked to the white light of the thermalitic gel burning through the blast doors then back to Minh-Chu. “Good timing, I think Alaka’s team just cornered the Order squad he was tracking.”

  “Cargo bay three, Captain,” Alaka announced through his communicator. “We could use some help. The enemy may retreat in your direction.”

  “Is there a good place to break through with a hull buster over there?” Jake asked as he dropped two mines in front of the door he was burning through.

  “As good as any, a nice wide loading door leading aft,” Alaka replied.

  “That’s hilarious,” Dent said to Minh-Chu. “They’ll come through the door thinking there’s a whole bunch of us waiting for them once it burns through and…”

  “We all get the picture,” Minh-Chu said. “After those go off, this whole hallway will be impossible to get through. You have a really dark idea of funny.”

  The group started running, following the three heavily armoured guards in front of Jake and Ayan, who were equally armoured. Jake was thankful for the mild stims that were keeping him going, and the vacsuit that was helping him keep his balance. He tried to reload his quad barrel rifle while running, but decided to wait when he nearly fumbled his shells. “How is the access to the rest of the ship?”

  “I’m headed to Alaka’s position too,” Remmy said. “All the systems in the forward section of the ship are dead. Some thanks to electromagnetic pulse damage, others have been cut off from engineering, I assume to keep us from taking control.”

  “This is a smart crew,” Jake said. “I hate that.” He stowed his quad barrel rifle and did his best to let his vacsuit teach him to run, keep him balanced and moving forward. He’d never been so tired in his life, sweat dripped down his face. He was thankful that his suit had a system that gently dried him and sequestered the sweat for processing along with other waste.

  The dark run down the hallways was a quick one, they had no time to waste. According to his timer, the Triton expected the Pontos to explode in five minutes and fifty-seven seconds. “Alaka, get your people behind cover and stop firing on the enemy immediately. I’ve got to try something before we all get slagged.” He stopped in front of a pair of large doors that led into cargo bay three.

  “Aye, finding cover and ceasing fire,” Alaka said.

  “Oh, and use your stealth systems to get into position if you can, this might not work,” Jake said. He took a few seconds to catch his breath then opened communications on all channels. “This is Captain Valent, looking to contact the Captain of the Blessed Mission. I would like to offer a ceasefire so we can take a wormhole away from Kambis. The Pontos is about to explode, taking this ship and its crew with it.”

  The response was so immediate that it surprised Jake. “Never,” said a young male voice. “I would have destroyed this ship already if I wasn’t sure we would repel your attack and take you captive. Your ship is adrift outside, our sister ship survived your ill-conceived attack. Now I will have the honour of watching you die with us. My immortal frame will preserve me, and I-“

  Jake closed the channel, cutting him off. “All units, this is now a seek and destroy mission. Take no prisoners, give no quarter unless our enemy approaches without weapons and hands raised. We are not going to the bridge, our new goal is to get to the nearest working control node and to get this ship to safety. Anyone standing in the way of our mission is to be killed quickly, efficiently. Execute my orders immediately.”

  Jake could feel an explosion from the cargo bay on the other side of the door, and the rumble of gunfire. His tactical display updated with information from Remmy’s team. They were about to join the fighting through the cargo bay door on the opposite side.

  “You all right?” Ayan asked.

 
; He hadn’t realized it, but he was still breathing heavily. He ordered a round of fortifying medications and stims through his command and control unit and drew his quad rifle. His thoughts seemed to focus, the urgent need for air abated, allowing him to get his breathing under control, and he even felt firmer on his feet. “Better than ever,” Jake said.

  “About time we got about the business of taking this ship,” Frost said.

  “Aye,” Jake agreed. He nodded towards Stephanie and her boarding team, and they pulled the manual lever for the door. The tall pair of cargo bay doors opened, revealing an unfair firefight. Alaka’s team, sixty three Triton troops and Remmy’s Rangers had the last of the Order of Eden soldiers cornered. There was another group sneaking through the corridors around the cargo bay just in case reinforcements were needed.

  Jake could see there was still a little hesitation in how his orders were being executed. The Order of Eden group, reduced to only four, had been driven back behind a stack of heavily armoured metal crates. They were peeking out from behind to burst fire at their enemies whenever their shields were charged just enough. There was no time to press a surrender.

  Jake set the firing power on his quad barrel rifle low, and angled it up. He fired the first grenade in a smooth arc so it landed right beside the crates. It was a miss, but close enough for him to find his range. One of the hold-outs was frightened out of cover and was immediately torn apart by the boarding team’s weapons. Jake fired two more grenades and hit the mark, incinerating the rest. “Let’s get that hull buster up here, now!” Jake ordered. To his surprise, three hull busters were brought forward by the boarding parties in addition to the one carried by a rather short and slender pilot from behind him. “Um, do you really still need mine?” she asked.

  “Damn right we do,” Stephanie said, “Thanks Sticky, we’re going to make sure there are extra ration credits loaded for our new galley once we get through this.” She took the hull buster and led her boarding party back down the hallway they came.

  The rest of the boarding parties affixed the circular shaped plasma charges to the three interior cargo bay doors that led into the main section of the ship. In the meantime, Jake opened another comm channel on all frequencies. “Your Captain has sealed your fate. I have ordered my teams to execute anyone who does not surrender the instant we make contact. Those who surrender will be treated fairly, and most importantly, you will survive this because we will get this ship out of the radius of the Pontos’ self destruct action. You can broadcast your surrender signal to me on any channel, I will receive it.” Jake was surprised to hear an ear-stinging guffaw of a laugh over the secure boarding party channel.

  “Oh, c’mon Remmy, what’s so funny?” Alice chastised. “We’re about to get slagged because of a bunch of religious fanatic idiots.”

  “I don’t know, it shouldn’t be funny, I’m sorry, maybe it’s the tension,” Remmy said through suppressed laughter. “Still working the mission, Captain, don’t worry.”

  “Weirdo-butthead,” Alice shot back.

  “All right,” Ayan said, “let’s get ready to breach those doors.” The skitters who abandoned the Warlord with them, along with the shield droid that survived the initial fighting in the landing bay rushed between them.

  Jake followed as the hull busters fired. Super-hot plasma melted through the doors. The armoured cup that focused the plasma heated to red by the time they were finished. The shield droid moved ahead while the skitters leapt onto the interior doors and pried the circular hull busters off before the boarding teams had time to get to it.

  A gust of atmosphere from the other side of the door rushed out, pulling a crewman in a flimsy vacsuit through the middle door. Jake, Ayan, Minh-Chu and several of their comrades couldn’t help but flinch sympathetically as the crewman bounced off a heavy crate, pinwheeled through the air, rebounded off the ceiling then crashed against the far wall of the cargo bay. “Think he survived that?” Frost asked. “Poor lad.”

  “Nope, definitely not,” replied one Warlord soldier from behind.

  “Hold your fire!” shouted someone from the inside. “We surrender!” shouted another. The atmosphere on the other side was held in by an isolation field of a type Jake had never seen before, keeping the rest of an engineering team safe on the other side. “We work for Regent Galactic, the contract with the Order isn’t worth this!” exclaimed a third. The dashes across the chest of his thin navy blue vacuum suit marked him as a Quality Assurance Manager, equivalent in rank to a Junior Chief.

  There were forty-two of them, all gathered in a main concourse intersection. “We’ve got a terminal open for you right there,” their leader said shakily, pointing just behind him as he slowly lowered himself to the deck, putting his hands behind his head. “My password and clearance chip are already in.”

  Ayan rushed forward, the skitters around her heels. By the time she got to the panel, the skitters had pulled a line from the console free. They held it out so she could connect it to her command and control unit. “Installing our flag software, here’s hoping the operating system here is close enough to the Barricade’s for this to work.”

  Jake checked what was happening through his command and control unit. The flag software uploaded seamlessly and overwrote the permissions files for the ship in seconds, replacing them with new files that made the ship property of Triton Fleet, locking out all but two security codes. If it weren’t for the surrender of one of their enemies with an access code, it would have taken much longer to work. How much longer, Jake could only guess, but with two minutes and one second left on the clock before the Pontos exploded, he guessed it would have been too much. “I need someone to do the calculations here,” Ayan said.

  Minh-Chu and Ashley both rushed forward under the protection of several boarding team members. “Can you just get us out of the solar system please?” asked Frost. “No fancy calculations necessary, just get us far enough.”

  “Shush, that’s the plan,” Ashley said. “Here, Minh, check my math,” she said, stepping away from the console.

  “She’s done?” asked one of their new prisoners. “That’s too fast, that can’t be right.”

  Jake nudged him in the side with his boot as he passed. “Silence is survival,” he growled. He didn’t want to kill anyone else, but he didn’t have to let his captives know.

  “It’s good, generating wormhole, tipping the ship into it, and catching the Warlord against the port wing,” he said.

  Jake flinched and sucked air in through his teeth as he heard a distant collision and scraping sound.

  “Don’t worry, Captain,” Frost said with a chuckle, “It’ll buff right out.”

  * * *

  “All fighters recovered,” Chief Mendle announced from the flight deck beneath Oz’s feet. “All but one of our gunships are out of the danger area, rescue operations on Ripsaw’s gunship were successful, he and his Senoir Operations Officer are stable in stasis.”

  “Bring them aboard as soon as the Triton is clear,” Oz said. He looked back to the tactical hologram in the centre of the bridge. He was on his feet, staring at the Blessed Mission as it slowly collided with the Warlord, heading for a wormhole it had just generated. “I wouldn’t have thought of that,” he muttered.

  “C’mon, Jake,” Victor said from beside him, startling Oz.

  He looked back to the tactical display in time to see the Blessed Mission slip into the wormhole. The Warlord was precariously balanced against a port side section of hull that jutted out three times as wide as the smaller ship. “Minh, if that works, you’ll be the talk of the Pilot’s Den for weeks.”

  “He’ll be the talk of the pilot’s den for months if it doesn’t,” Victor remarked.

  The battlecruiser and the Warlord disappeared from sight as they finished transitioning into the wormhole, leaving two Order of Eden destroyers and their carrier behind. The destroyers manoeuvred in front of the carrier, shuttles moved from them to the larger ship at a frenzied pace. The thi
ck landing bay doors closed, leaving several shuttles stranded.

  The timer estimating when the Pontos would explode counted down from one minute and ten seconds. “How accurate is that?” Victor asked.

  Oz looked to his analysis team. Henrietta and the analyst beside her both shrugged. “Could be off by as much as thirty seconds,” she said.

  “Fifty, maybe even more,” added the officer beside her.

  She shot him a withering look.

  “Well, true, right?” he whispered back.

  She only had time to nod once before the sensors aboard the Triton were overloaded with an antimatter explosion larger than anyone in that solar system had ever seen.

  “I’m sorry,” Oz said before the light diminished.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Hausgiest replied in his thoughts. ‘The Pontos was so consumed with hate, and so corrupted by the cause of Citadel, that there was no saving him.’

  “Hausgiest, could you determine the enemy ship’s cause? Why are Citadel getting involved with the Order of Eden?” he asked as the bridge crew watched their systems reset. Oz wanted the crew to hear the answer, it had already made its mark on his mind.

  “The Citadel crew had the Pontos’ intelligence fully convinced that once the Order’s enemies were defeated, they would turn towards the Sol System. The Order of Eden has promised Citadel their assistance in taking control of the home world. The Pontos believed that we were allied with Sol Defence because of our involvement with the Lorander Corporation.”

  “Why would our connection with Lorander make anyone think we were with Sol Defence?” Victor asked.

  “I plan on asking them that as soon as we’ve finished securing orbital space. Have our allies checked in?” Oz asked.

  “The British Alliance and the Barricade have checked in,” Agameg replied. “The rest are coming in slowly as they recover from the blast.”

  “The carrier group?” Oz asked as he watched the tactical display slowly repopulate and update.

  “The enemy carrier is severely damaged. Main thrusters are destroyed, their transponder is broadcasting an automated emergency signal. The battlecruiser and the destroyer that were holding position in front of the carrier are dead in space, sensors are still resetting, but I doubt we will find survivors.”