Guard at the Gates of Hell (Gladius Book 1)

by George Olney

  She waited with her hand on the door switch until she got acknowledgment. //"Go!"//

  Ettranty and Andews spun as the front door crashed open and the two troopers darted into the room, pistols out. The distraction was enough for Shana to leave the bedroom and walk into the confrontation, gun in hand. "Narsima Ettranty, Narsima Andews," she said in a cold flat voice, "you are under arrest. Do not resist."

  Matic Ettranty stared at her for a moment and recognition dawned in his eyes. "Shana! You're Shana!"

  She nodded without speaking. She was watching him carefully. There was something going on behind his eyes. She was warned when his expression grew more calculating.

  "Sim Shana Ettranty," he said with a peculiar tone in his voice. "Listen to your father. Kill these two men." His voice didn't change as he added, "And yourself."

  She felt her hand trying to move the gun towards Smythe and saw the satisfaction in her father's eyes. It was the words! They were the signal to activate the compulsion the doctor had warned her about! She was frightened for a second at the idea that she couldn't control her own will, then remembered the doctor saying he'd toned down the compulsion. It couldn't control her. That was why the gun was trying to move but going nowhere.

  She let the gun drift towards her men, then stopped it and slowly swung it back to her father, watching his expression turn to shock. "You got the name wrong, Father," she said in a flat, deadly voice. "It's now Lieutenant Shana Ettranty, and I'm not the puppet you own any more. I won't kill my men and I won't kill myself."

  When the gun settled on her father, she fired.

  #####

  Legion Sergeant Major Olmeg was at the docking platform when the cutter with Shana's Strike platoon landed. He already had a backchannel report from Sergeant First Class Stauer and was dreading what was coming off that cutter. Andews was hauled off first, his head in a bag and bindings around his arms. The Femiams were next, unbound and much more politely escorted off by Sergeant Kardo. He would accompany them to their temporary quarters while Andews was headed for a detention cell and a long session with Intel's interrogators.

  Shana was the last one off the cutter, just behind Captain Dass. Julie Dass had a very worried look on her face. Both were in stealth suits and had their hoods thrown back. "Mission accomplished, Sergeant Major," Shana said in a dead voice.

  He looked hard at her. There was no trace of makeup and her streaked hair was pulled back in a ponytail. It was her eyes that bothered him. There was a spark missing. Captain Dass was giving him a worried look of entreaty. "You got your targets, Lieutenant," he said to Shana. "Good job."

  She stared back at him with an empty expression. "I killed my father."

  The Sergeant Major looked her in the eyes for a moment then growled, "Remain here, Lieutenant, if you please." He gave a toss of his head to the Captain to let her know he was now in charge of the situation and for her to leave it with him. Now he had to do something about a damaged lieutenant.

  He spun on a heel and stumped over to Sergeant Stauer. "Find the Legate! He's up in the Legion CP last I heard. Tell him I said to get his ass down to your platoon bay... now! He's needed. Tell him why, and you tell him just like I said it, understand?"

  Sergeant Stauer nodded, a wry smile briefly quirked his lips at the idea of quoting the Sergeant Major to the Legate, but he knew exactly what was happening. "Aye, Sergeant Major. Back in ten."

  "Make it five. Go." The Sergeant Major didn't wait to watch Stauer leave. He stumped back to where Shana was standing, staring at nothing, and gently pulled her elbow around until she was facing the direction her troops were heading. "Lieutenant, with your permission, we'll both go and get your troops settled."

  Once in the platoon bay, he took Shana to her little office and closed the door behind them. He sat her in one of the chairs then stood before her. "Tell me what happened, girl."

  The story came out slowly, haltingly, full of pain, but she told him all of it. She once again went through the moment when she decided her father couldn't be allowed to live, when she realized he wasn't her father, just a dangerous creature that cared nothing for any other person but himself. "It was the order to kill myself that did it, Sergeant Major. I realized I was nothing but an inconvenience to him. He told me to kill myself simply to remove a problem. I had to kill him. I couldn't let him live and do the same thing over and over again.

  "I had to kill him," she repeated softly, tears misting in her eyes.

  "Look at me, girl," he said softly. "You did right. I would have done the same thing in your place. It's the way we are. I know he was your father, but he wasn't what you thought. He was foul. What he's done to Cauldwell was enough to earn a death sentence in any case. Girl, the man's deliberately held an entire planet isolated out here, murdered a whole city's population, and done it to serve an Emperor that personifies foulness. He did it willingly and sucked the life out of his people in the doing.

  "You can mourn, girl," he continued softly, "but mourn the man he could have been. You did the right thing and nobody will ever say different. You will say it, in the dark of night. You'll always second guess yourself. Every Gladius has a thing or two we keep buried that comes out and gnaws at us at times, but we all have to put it by.

  "Listen to me, Lieutenant Shana Ettranty, and listen well," he said. "You can weep for the man he could have been. Destroying the man he was is the only thing you could have done. Not a man or woman in this Legion or any other will disagree. He may have raised you, but we are your family and your family loves you. Know that."

  She looked up at him, tears slowly trickling down her cheeks, but her eyes were no longer dead. "I killed my father and they still like me?" she asked in a little girl voice.

  He nodded solemnly. "Not like, Lieutenant Shana Ettranty - and you have made the Ettranty name a name of pride, not a name of shame like that man made it - your family loves and respects you. Now more than ever."

  He heard the door open behind him and turned his head to see the Legate quickly enter. "Some love you more than others, Lieutenant Shana Ettranty. Here's one that does."

  As the two behind him fell into each other's arms, the Sergeant Major started to leave. Behind him, he heard the sound of Shana's deep, broken sobs and the Legate's soft words. He quietly closed the door to leave them alone.

  #####

  The Legion was released to conduct activities outside the caverns two days later. Shana's platoon assembled outside the huge camouflaged front entrance in physical training shorts, running shoes and T shirts. As Shana took over the formation from Sergeant Stauer, the whole platoon could see there was something different about her. Her streaked hair was down and held by a sweat band, not up in her habitual duty braid. Her face was different, too. There was a look in her eyes that wasn't there before, a look of maturity, of someone that understood the full price duty and life could exact.

  Watching her, one of the troopers in the back muttered, "The old girl's out to get something off her chest today and us poor dogs are going to be the lucky bastards that help her do it."

  Corporal Smythe started to bridle at Shana being called "old girl", but Sergeant Stauer growled from his position behind the formation, "At ease, Smythe. She was ours - and his - a long time before you adopted her. We're all original Victrix except for you and your friends. So is Lieutenant Ettranty. Ormond respects her. We all do. Just relax."

  Shana looked at her platoon for a moment and said, "Boys, today we're going to celebrate our return to the sun by going for a little stroll. Right face!

  "Quick time mar-r-r-ch, ho!

  "Double time, ho! Link up and swing out, dogs. Sing the cadence!"

  As the unit began its run she fell into the hypnotizing running chant and the rhythmic thump-thump of feet hitting the ground in cadence. She could feel the wind begin to blow her loose hair and she was again becoming part of a Whole greater than her. There was nothing in the world but herself and her twenty men, running to the chant and Linked into a si
ngle being with twenty one separate bodies and one purpose - to run for no other reason than to run. She knew They were with her still, Those Gone Before, the Legion's dead women, and she wasn't unclean, despite her father, despite what she did. She was still Their living avatar. The wind and the sun so long denied her by her duty were washing away her taint, the taint of patricide. The love of Karl, the unspoken love of the man she finally recognized as her real father - gruff Sergeant Major Olmeg - the respect of her Legion, the love of the legion's women Gone Before, all were making her clean again.

  "The ax song," she yelled after a running chant finished. "Sing it, boys!"

  She picked up the funny little song as the men started it, joined them as they clapped to its beat, her long legs matching their pace stride for stride, feeling her sorrow and shame being washed away by the wind in her hair, the sun on her face, and the quiet love deep inside her from the dead women she represented.

  "Oh, my mother was a lady, so she didn't love me,

  "Hey, hanta lay ya!

  "She said my father was a bastard, so a soldier I'd be,

  "Hey, hanta lay yo!"

  "So a soldier I'd be," she breathed to herself. She was content with that.

  CHAPTER 12

  THE WAHOO

  IMPERIAL SPACE

  The S-1024, A.K.A. the Wahoo, was one of the new Fleet Class S-boats. She was purpose designed, larger and far more capable than the earlier converted corvettes used to prove the concept. The S-boat had been invented over a year ago and current legend said the idea had come out of mixing a formal military dining-in, a Gladius officer with an oddball taste for ancient naval history, an admiral looking for an edge over the Imperial Fleet, and a great deal of alcohol. Whatever the source of the idea, the Frontier Cluster Fleet set out to create an analog of an ancient ocean going ship known as a "submarine".

  The background idea was very simple. The ancient submarine hid by diving under water. A modern warship hid by using a suppresser field, but using suppresser heavily limited the warship's scope of maneuver and action. However, suppose a ship was designed from the keel up to be used primarily in suppresser? Hm.

  The question of weapons became important because warships instantly revealed themselves the moment they fired their guns. Again, history came to the rescue. The primary weapon of ancient submarines was an underwater mechanically driven missile known as a "torpedo". Looking at the question, the people brainstorming the suppresser ship idea decided that a missile with an onboard suppresser generator might work. Missiles were considered obsolete because they were slow, limited in range, and easy for a warship to dodge or destroy. However... a suppressed missile with the proper penetration aids might just make it into contact where the antimatter warhead could kill a target.

  Cluster Fleet R&D ran with the notion and converted ten corvettes to be the first S-boats. They were termed "boats" instead of "ships" because ancient submarines were always known as boats for some reason and ancient submarine tradition was already beginning to permeate the project.

  The first S-boats were tested in combat when a squadron of the first Imperial frigates ever encountered attempted to enter Cluster space on a course for Tactine. The ensuing battle cost the Frontier Fleet heavily and it looked like one of the frigates was going to escape. That was the Fleet's worse nightmare because the frigate could reveal what was happening out in Cluster space. In the end, the escaping frigate was destroyed by an S-boat torpedo.

  Huge sigh of relief for all concerned and the realization that something new had been added to the Cluster Fleet's arsenal.

  Those converted corvettes proved successful in combat, but were not well loved by their crews. In fact, they were universally termed by their spacers with a name also dredged from ancient submarine lore, "pigboats".

  Those pioneering conversions were termed pigboats with good reason. The early S-boats gave a new definition to cramped. Aboard a pigboat, for instance, the bunks for the three person crew were stacked in a niche that was slightly larger than a walk-in closet. The ten crew members of a Fleet Class boat at least had reasonable accommodations that would allow them to survive a long war patrol without going crazy.

  A purpose designed Fleet class boat was a good bit larger than the original conversions, its elongated teardrop form dictated by the characteristics of its extremely powerful suppresser field. Normal warships were optimized for combat function and the suppresser field generator was simply added equipment, making the field somewhat inefficient. Fleet class S-boats were designed with the suppresser field in mind from the beginning and were nearly undetectable. The boats had six torpedo tubes with five reloads each, set back from the bow to allow the entire bulbous nose to be used for passive sensors, sensors far more sophisticated and capable than normal. In a nod to Fleet tradition, there was a 30 centimeasure gun in a turret on the top deck, a third of the way back from the bow. The onboard compliment of recon and decoy drones was higher than a normal warship, too. A Fleet Class boat could handle itself very well in hostile space.

  In all, Commander Alice Toklas, a cheerful, slightly chubby type, was quite happy to have a brand spanking new Fleet Class S-boat of her own to play with, and just simply dozens of Imperial systems in which to play. Someone looking at Alice would swear - mistakenly - she didn't have a sneaky bone in her body. Actually, she was a natural match for the supremely sneaky S-boats.

  Alice was in the third system of her war patrol and they already had two kills. Now it looked like they were about to get number three. Instead of fat merchantmen like the first two, however, there was a lovely big Imperial heavy cruiser just coasting along into her attack range and begging for a torpedo or two. She was quite willing to oblige this nice gift from a beneficent Emperor.

  "Make your course 4950 mils relative to current course and 1000 mils ascension, Pilot," she ordered. "Let's see if we can't get onto the six of that big bastard."

  "Aye, Captain, course 4-9-5-0 relative and 1000 up."

  There were 6400 military mils, known as milliradians on formal occasions, in a circle. Mils were the universal standard rather than the ancient "degrees" and "seconds" because, not only were they more precise, they were decimal based. An order to travel in the direction of 4950.551997 was quite normal, but that degree of precision was only used by navigators traveling interstellar distances.

  The Wahoo moved upward to the left at an agonizingly slow .09C, but the crew was used to a long slow stalk by now. The watchword of S-boats was invisibility. Haste made you visible, especially if your drive was working hard enough to bleed through your suppresser field. Alice calmly watched the cruiser in her screen ever so slowly change position relative to her ship. They were nearly in position to take a shot and it had better be good, she thought. It was the only one they were going to get. You didn't get a second shot on a warship. Hell, you didn't take a second shot on a warship!

  Two years ago, she thought, this would have been agonizing to any self-respecting Cluster Fleet crew. Everything was wham, bam, thank you ma'am for those guys. However, the S-boat service chose ruthlessly for patience and cunning. S-boat crews were volunteers, rigidly screened for compatibility, and graduates of a stiff qualification course. The qualification badge from the course was the icon of an S-boat surrounded by the dotted line indicating the icon was at a suspected, not verified, position. Every S-boat spacer was proud of what that badge implied.

  S-boat operations were highly classified and even the existence of the boats themselves was closely held. Only the boat crews and Commander, S-boats, knew where a particular boat went on her war patrol until she came back bearing Imperial scalps or didn't come back at all. S-boat spacers didn't talk. They even borrowed a name from antiquity, "the Silent Service".

  Full of enthusiasm for the ancient submarine crews, S-boat spacers studied every record they could find about them. The more spacers learned, the more in awe of their predecessors they got. One of Alice's favorite sources was an ancient submarine "movie" titled "Run Si
lent, Run Deep". She learned a lot about submarine lifestyle and tactics from that story, not to mention that both of the main characters were really cute. She wouldn't have minded hopping into bed with that sub skipper at all and the XO was just dreamy.

  She checked her tactical screen and saw they were nearly behind the cruiser. "Weapons. Time to firing solution?"

  "Solution zero one mikes from mark... Mark." One minute.

  "Confirm outer doors on tubes one and six open."

  "Confirm outer doors on tubes one and six open, aye." The process was automatic, but you had to check.

  Alice stared at her screen, watching the attitude indicator change on the cruiser's icon then checked the time readout. It read twenty seconds. "Firing solution?"

  "Firing solution confirmed."

  S-boat spacers used the same formal command sequences of their submarine predecessors. No Fleet combat informality here.

  The tension on the command deck was palpable, but everyone was still quietly professional, totally silent except for orders and responses. Alice had no exact analog for the feeling in the boat, but the attack scenes in that old movie conveyed the sensation exactly. No wonder she and her crew felt a kinship with those ancient submariners.

  "Shoot." She gave the command quietly as the timer read zero then sensed, rather than felt, the twin rumbles as the torpedoes left their tubes. "Pilot, make your course 3150 relative and slowly bring up speed for TFD translation. Weapons, confirm outer doors closed."

  "3-1-5-0 relative," the pilot repeated. "Initiating slow speed increase for TFD. Estimated time of translation in one zero mikes."