Capp looked incredulous. “So you’re going to set it down on the asteroid and invite them to take it?”
Catarina pushed the last third of her beer across to Carvalho and rose to her feet. “Now you get it. Carvalho and Greeves, I want the striker wing on standby. Capp, get yourself to the stasis chambers and start waking up marines. We’re going to dig tunnels—you are going to dig tunnels, I mean. Wake as many marines as you need to guard them. You’re a former marine yourself, and I’ve seen your combat record.”
“Aye, Cap’n. I’ve fought buzzards, traitors, and pirates. If them Vikings are dumb enough to land, I’ll handle ’em, don’t worry.”
“I’m not sure you know what you’re facing, Lieutenant. These are Scandian raiders.”
“How is that any different? Still blokes with guns, ain’t they?”
“One of your ‘blokes,’ as you call them, wears a mech suit that can take a .50-caliber bullet, survive a grenade blast, and physically tear off an enemy’s arms and legs. And you’ll be facing a small army of them.” Catarina paused to let that sink in. “Make your battle plans accordingly.”
#
Lieutenant Capp had to land eleven hundred tons of material every hour for eighty-two straight hours to finish the initial drop. From that, she would construct a basic landing platform, burrow tunnels in the surface of the asteroid, place batteries of anti-ship missiles, and dig holes for torpedo tubes. The guns would come later—the various cannons for the batteries she’d build in five different locations on the surface—but that would take weeks, if not months, of work. And she’d need engineers and some of Barker’s boys from the gunnery to do it right.
Right now, it was get the goods down, get them buried, and get them defended by marines and light gun emplacements. That required a . . . what was the word Captain Vargus used? Right, a Herculean effort.
Capp was one of the first three to land, together with two of Vargus’s old crew, former pirates by the names of Nix and Bergerand, who immediately started screwing around with their suits, playing in the low gravity. The next shuttle came moments later. It hovered overhead as the three of them unclipped its payload, then stood back while it dropped slowly to the ground under the slight gravity. The payload bounced to a halt, kicking up dust. It was half of the heavy scraper that would start tearing up the ground as soon as they got the engine attached.
Nix and Bergerand started leaping about again as soon as the shuttle nudged away. The asteroid was the size of a small moon, with three percent gravity, so they didn’t need to stay tethered. But each hop lifted them eight or ten feet above the ground. They came down in clouds of dust, leaping higher and higher each time.
Capp turned on the com. “King’s balls, these mechs ain’t toys.”
“Sure they are, Capp. Live a little.” Nix took a big jump this time, right over Bergerand’s head. “Four minutes until the next drop,” he added as he drifted back down. “How else we gonna pass the time?”
Nix was a bit of a wanker. For one, he’d tried to kill her once (he had that ridiculous Gatling-gun attachment for his missing arm), but mainly he was lazy and trivial when he needed to stay focused. But he apparently knew how to operate eleven different kinds of scrapers, dozers, and excavators. He’d be indispensable for digging out their underground base. Unless he jumped so high he launched himself into orbit.
“Check it out,” Nix said as he took another leap. This time he easily cleared twenty feet. “You can see right out of the crater.”
The crater hadn’t seemed so big from space. At about six hundred yards in diameter and roughly thirty feet deep, it was lost in the battered landscape, where millions of years had left countless scars, many far more impressive than this one. But it was the perfect size to house the main base, with adequate perimeter shielding provided by the crater walls. Once inside, Capp felt swallowed by its size.
Bergerand took his own jump, this one even higher than Nix’s. “Come on, Capp! It’s awesome.”
She glanced up. The sky overhead gleamed with the lights of shuttles emerging from barges, Hroom sloops patrolling the asteroid cluster, and Orient Tiger, Pussycat, and Void Queen running training maneuvers.
Some ships gathered in a cluster above the horizon to her right. These were loaded with Vargus’s colonists, recently thawed and given orders. They would come down and start working—today fifty, two hundred more tomorrow. A thousand by the end of the week. In two weeks—assuming they survived that long—Catarina hoped to have four thousand workers burrowed into the surface of Fort Alliance, together with hundreds of marines. That was, if battle didn’t arrive first.
This was the only lull Capp was likely to enjoy. As soon as the next shuttle drop came, she’d be working around the clock until she collapsed with exhaustion. Even then, she’d only be able to snatch a few hours of sleep before starting over. She couldn’t resist. The servos of her suit whirred as she bent her legs, and she launched skyward.
For a first jump, Capp shot much higher than she’d planned. The other two hooted and cheered over the com. She slowed gradually at the apex and seemed to hang in the air at the top. Her jump had cleared the top of the crater and left her a view across the landscape. It was an endless vista of craters. There were craters within craters within craters. The one next to her own looked much older, with a battered appearance to the crater wall. In fact, hers looked startlingly young and featureless in comparison.
Capp turned her head as she drifted back down. There, on the other side, was a blemish, right on the far rim of her crater. A rock or something sticking out. She turned on the viewscreen on the interior of her helmet and zoomed to get a better view. It wasn’t a rock at all. It was an artificial structure, boxlike, protruding from the crater wall.
She bounced to a halt. “There’s a building on the other side.”
“What the devil are you babbling about?” Nix asked.
“I saw a building. This must be an old mining base.”
“Nah,” Bergerand said. “It’s clean. They ran scans, and the whole site is cold as dust.”
“I’m telling you, I saw something. You stay here. When the drop comes, get the crawler put together and get to work. I mean it, no screwing around.”
“Where are you going?” Nix asked as she hopped away.
“Shut up and do what I tell you,” she said without looking back. “If you ain’t busting your butts when I get back, I’m going to drag you out of your suits and give them to someone who knows how to work.”
Capp turned off the com link rather than listen to their protests. She started to hop away just as the next shuttle came. A voice from the nearest barge warned to expect the next drop in ninety-five seconds. This one would bring three more crew in mech suits. After that, the drops would come faster and faster.
Aware that she was shirking her duties just as things were heating up, Capp hopped off as fast as she could. She’d been sure about what she’d seen, but down on the ground, bobbing up and down over the terrain, she began to doubt her memory. A building? In here?
Not that it wasn’t possible. Smythe had sent her some old charts, and apparently there had been mining colonies all through the Great Bear’s asteroid belt. The collapse of the Scandian kingdom had led to raids and slaving expeditions, which had left the mining operations abandoned, looted, and largely destroyed. Radiation scans weren’t perfect; maybe they’d missed an old heat signature.
“It’s a big bloody asteroid,” she muttered. “Ain’t likely we’d land right in the middle of an old camp by mistake.”
Except the odds really weren’t that bad, were they? The crater was the perfect size for the defensible heart of Fort Alliance; that was how it had been chosen, by scan and a computer analysis. In an earlier time, someone might have run the same calculations and come up with the same answer. In fact, the more she looked at it, the more she thought the basin might not be a crater at all, but a six-hundred-yard excavated base. She scanned the perimeter and spotted other artifi
cial-looking structures protruding.
Capp reached the edge and looked up. Yup, there it was. An entrance made of some sealed, concrete-like material, together with what looked like blast doors. There was no stairway up the rock wall of the crater interior. She bent and took a big leap. Too hard. She overshot the door on her way up, but grabbed hold of it on the way down and held herself in place.
On closer inspection, the structure didn’t look as new as she’d taken it for. The crater may not have been pocked with visible craters, but the door and protruding structure had a pitted, worn look. The doorway was short, too. Maybe for unmanned machinery? She tugged on the door, half expecting it to swing open. Of course it didn’t.
Holding herself in place with her left hand, she lifted her right index finger and turned on the suit’s plasma torch, thinking to cut the door in half. It was harder than it looked, but the torch could cut through tyrillium, and gradually burned through.
Nix found a way through to her com. “The new crew is here, and they need orders.”
“Figure it out yourself. I’m busy.”
“I’ve got a scraper to run, Capp. I don’t have time to babysit these guys. What in blazes are you doing up there, anyway?”
“I was right, it’s a building. I’m going inside to have a look.”
That only brought more questions, and she couldn’t seem to shake Nix from the channel, but when she turned down the volume, he didn’t bother her so much.
Capp cut to the bottom of the door, turned off the torch, and pried. Her power suit strained. Movement.
Air gushed out like a high-pressure hose and blew her clear. She spun end over end, cursing, but was laughing by the time she hit the ground and bounced back in the air before settling into the dust. She should have known there would still be atmosphere in there. In fact, for all she knew, there might be people inside. That sobered her. If so, they wouldn’t be happy that she’d breached an airlock.
If they’ve been hiding down there, it serves ’em right, don’t it?
Capp got to her feet and jumped back up to grab hold of the door. There was no more air rushing out, and she pried and wrenched at the hole she’d cut. It took another minute to get the door free, then she slipped inside, where she turned on her helmet light to illuminate her surroundings.
She was in a tunnel. Not very big; barely tall enough to stand up in. Too short for marines to move around comfortably, let alone Hroom. She made her way deeper in, a little nervous at first, but that impression soon gave way. There were recessed lights overhead, but they were all dark. No light except the one from her helmet. No equipment on the walls, or fixtures of any kind to identify who had built the place. This tunnel, at least, was long abandoned.
Capp tried to share what she’d found, but she was too deep underground already to get a signal. You could call across millions of miles of vacuum easier than through twenty feet of solid rock.
She continued forward. The tunnel ended at a closed lift without any power, but she’d passed a couple of side tunnels on her way down, so she backtracked. Here, she had to duck her head to get in, as the tunnel was even lower in height, no more than six feet, and the mech suit gave her a height of seventy-five inches.
The side tunnel shortly opened into a room without an exit. Here, she saw her first evidence of the builders. It was a small wheeled vehicle with a bore-like bit on the end, like a small mining truck. Articulating arms hung on either side of the vehicle, tucked like folded duck wings to economize space. But the thing that grabbed her attention was the size of the seat. Only a kid would fit in that thing.
Capp stared at it for several seconds before she realized what she was looking at. Her heart started to pound.
She hurried out of the tunnel until she got to the open air. They were all shouting for her on the com, including Rodriguez, who was in charge of the base-building operation, and there were messages from Catarina Vargus herself. Capp jumped down to the crater floor, cut the other channels, and called Void Queen. Smythe answered, demanded answers.
“Shut up, Smythe, and put Vargus on the line. This is important, yeah?”
“I thought I could count on you,” Vargus said when she came on. “Then I find out you’ve been jumping about and exploring. This isn’t a bloody game, Lieutenant. I need you on task. We’re more pressed for time than ever. In fact—”
“Cap’n, listen! I found something.”
“Better be good, whatever it is.”
“Oh, it’s good. It’s weird, too, but definitely good. We ain’t the first people here. There’s a whole tunnel complex, with lifts and everything. It’s all abandoned, looks like, and it’s the wrong size, so we’ll still need to get our equipment in here and start cutting, but my God, this is going to save us all kinds of time.”
“You mean some kind of abandoned base?” The anger evaporated from the captain’s voice, replaced by excitement. “And you’re sure they’re all gone? No booby traps or other surprises? Wait, what do you mean by weird?”
Capp thought about what she’d seen. “Don’t think it was humans what built it, Cap’n. Some kind of aliens.”
The line went silent for a long moment. “Apex?”
“No, nothing like that. Hroom, neither. These was small people. Like space dwarves or something.”
“Space dwarves, Lieutenant? Check your oxygen levels, please.”
“Dwarves, yeah. You know what I mean. They was smaller than us. There’s short tunnels, and—just believe me, Cap’n. I ain’t making it up. We’ll need to bore ’em to get our stuff to fit, but it’s a good start. And it’s all old, I’m pretty sure. They’re gone, whoever they was. Could be a million years ago.”
“That is good news,” Vargus said, “although I’m not so keen on the unknown part. Be careful until you’ve got it figured out.”
“Aye, Cap’n. That’s my plan. Things were getting pretty hot, being rushed and all, but now I think we’re okay.”
“Unfortunately, the heat has just been turned up again, Lieutenant. Smythe has been looking for the enemy, using every trick in the book to get the most of his sensors. He picked up a strange echo. Didn’t last long, only a moment, but he thinks he’s found our enemy ships. They’re on their way.”
“We still got time, though, right?”
“Far less than I’d hoped,” the captain said. “Lieutenant, I know you just got started down there, but I need the rest of the goods on the surface. I’m going to be dumping stuff all around you whether you can handle it or not.”
“You’re scaring me, Cap’n. How long we got?”
“Thirty-seven hours, Lieutenant. Be as ready as you can.”
Chapter Fifteen
Olafsen’s six star wolves lurked in geosynchronous orbit above the scorched surface of Moloch, right in the dividing line between the sun-facing hemisphere of the planet and the side in perpetual shadow. Moloch didn’t rotate on its axis, but kept the same face to the star at all times, which was convenient for the Scandians. Enemy sensors could filter solar radiation and stare through and around a planet, and the approaching Albion warships were looking hard. But by hiding in that dividing line, he could make the most of his cloaking technology.
The plan: wait until the enemy commander sent ships to the surface to investigate the abandoned destroyer, then hit him hard. If the enemy divided his forces, Olafsen would concentrate all firepower on the stronger half until it was captured or destroyed. Hopefully, mostly captured. Every one of these ships was worth a small fortune in the yards of Viborg or Roskilde. The bigger ones could be stripped and rebuilt into star wolves.
Even apart from the wager with his brother, Olafsen especially wanted the cruiser. Peerless was a powerful, modern warship, a match by itself for any of the six star wolves under the marauder captain’s command.
The other captains were like wolfhounds straining at their leashes by the time the five enemy ships crossed the orbit of the second planet out and began their deceleration. More than one of the
m violated orders for signal silence to demand an early attack. Olafsen swore he’d drink the blood of the next man who opened his mouth, and that shut them up.
The two torpedo boats led the Albion force, followed by the Singaporean war junk, which extended its sensor sails as it slowed, making it look like a beetle with opened wings. Next came Peerless, followed by the missile frigate. That frigate would be murder if allowed to sit back lobbing missiles onto the battlefield. Olafsen had ordered Travek to take Icefall and charge it, which meant running the guns of the other ships, but Travek was bold enough to do it. Get at that frigate and either cripple it or destroy it entirely.
Meanwhile, Olafsen’s brother seemed to be detected as he took his eight wolves to attack the new enemy base. The battle cruiser and its support vessels suddenly picked up the pace, frantically throwing down equipment and offloading forces to the largest asteroid in their cluster. And the posture of their ships made it clear they knew the direction from which the attackers were approaching.
Good, Olafsen thought as he studied the data. Sven was strong enough to win the fight, but he’d get his nose bloodied, maybe even lose a ship or two. Might even be forced to destroy the battle cruiser, winning Olafsen the bet.
“Enemy forces separating,” Björnman said. Olafsen’s chief mate tapped his console. “Looks like the cruiser and the torpedo boats are coming in for a landing.”
“Leaving the beetle ship and the frigate behind,” Olafsen said. “Good strategy. One force to rescue the destroyer, one to stand back and watch for approaching enemies. Too bad for them that we’re already here.”
It was perfect for his plans. Let Icefall take out the frigate before its missiles flooded the battlefield, then hold off the war junk until Olafsen had mopped things up down here. As soon as Peerless came down for a landing, he’d spring his attack.
He studied the screen, glanced at his console. Twenty minutes. Except he’d have to move a little earlier, since they were on the wrong side of Moloch. Call it eighteen minutes. Hopefully, he’d stay hidden in shadow for a few precious minutes if he hugged the surface. Last moment, burst into space and pounce on the enemy from above as they descended.
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