by Rick Partlow
“Yes, Mr. President,” she said. “Sir, I know about the threat from the Protectorate fleet, but I have evidence that Brendan Riordan’s resources have been used by Kevin Fourcade to build an army of perhaps twenty thousand biomechs somewhere near Montreal. He’s been arming them with modern weapons and I believe he intends to mobilize them very soon…he’s probably been waiting for this strike by his fleet.”
“Isn’t this why we have orbital kinetic strike weapons, Colonel?” O’Keefe asked, a bit testy and impatient, she thought. “I’ll release their control to you…won’t that be enough to stop them?”
Shannon bit back her initial response and grabbed desperately at what little patience she had left. “Sir, those weapons are meant for use on hardened targets: weapons emplacements, terrorist strongpoints, armored columns. They are useful for fire support, but first they have to have someone to support. I need troops, sir, and lots of them.”
“Colonel Stark, I’m sorry…the RSC is needed to support the evacuation to the shelters. And I doubt they’re well-armed enough to do much anyway. We just don’t have that sort of force available!”
“Excuse me,” a harsh-edged, familiar voice came onto the ‘link. “I am sorry for intruding, Mr. President, but I was contacted by General Rietveld.” General Kage paused and she could almost hear the tight, satisfied grin on his ugly face. “I believe I may be of some help…”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Drew Franks sagged against his seat restraints, cursing softly as he watched the sensor display on the main screen, the thermal plumes hanging over Armstrong Base like a tombstone. Everyone on the bridge seemed stunned, even acting-Captain Lee. She closed her eyes for a moment, lips moving in what might have been a prayer.
“We do what we can,” she said finally. Franks thought it was becoming a mantra to her. “Lt. Bevins, take us back toward the enemy fleet.”
“We need to reach the Decatur,” Franks said, having to fight the shock just to find the strength to open his mouth. “They don’t know about the method we used to take out the ramships. At least I don’t think they do.”
“I’ve got a fix on them, Captain,” Wolford told her. “They have two ramships closing with them, and I’m reading more Eysselink drive signatures coming through the wormhole.”
“Set course to intercept the ramships, Lt. Bevins,” Lee ordered. “Two g acceleration.”
“Where the hell are they getting all the antimatter to run those things?” Bevins wondered, touching the controls that sent them pushing back into their acceleration couches with the fist of God pushing against their chests.
“They don’t need that much,” Franks pointed out, his voice strained. “They use the wormholes to travel the interstellar distances, and conventional drives when they’re not in combat. As for where they got it…well, there have been quite a few cargo ships pirated by them over the years. And maybe they’ve figured out how to make it themselves.”
Of course, there was also the very real possibility that it had been provided to them by Riordan and the other collaborators, but Franks was pretty certain that wasn’t something that Colonel Stark wanted him spreading around.
“What’s the tactical situation?” Lee asked.
“Ma’am,” Wolford answered, “I am currently reading at least 250 ships that have already come through the wormhole, and that’s not counting the 30 to 40 that the Decatur has taken out so far-I’m guessing on that number, from the wreckage floating around. I’m not currently reading anything coming through the gate, but I don’t know that means they don’t have any more to send.”
“If we take out the ramships first,” Franks mused, “we can plow right through the rest and they couldn’t touch us.”
Lee gave a curt nod that he barely saw. “Let’s just hope the Decatur can hold out till we get there, Lieutenant…”
* * *
Captain Joyce Minishimi barely blinked this time when the globular fusion explosion lit up the main viewscreen for an eyeblink then slid away.
“That’s the last ship in this cluster,” Gianeto told her. “The others have spread out pretty far to not give us an easy target.” He hesitated. “The two ramships are still on our tail. Three minutes till the lead ship intercepts our field at current accelerations.”
“No use putting it off any longer,” Minishimi sighed. She hit a control on her station’s console. “Commander Prieta,” she called to the Engineering officer.
“Yes, Captain,” the reply came immediately, as if he had been expecting the call. And maybe he had, she thought.
“How confident are you in the bypass you’ve rigged to keep us from experiencing a terminal overload if we touch fields with one of those ramships?”
“As I told Lt. Franks when he contacted me earlier,” he replied, “I can guarantee we can survive it once. The second time…” She heard the shrug in his voice. “It is a 50-50 chance, ma’am.”
“Well, as those ramships don’t seem to be lacking for fuel,” she decided, “it’s a chance we’re going to have to take. Prepare for field intersect in one minute Commander.” She turned to Gianeto. “Larry, we’re going to go to station keeping and let the lead ship run right into us. When our fields go down, we’re going to have less than five minutes to get them back up in time to hit the other one. During that time, we need to do what we saw the Brad do: launch a pair of Shipbusters and program one of them to take out the second ship after we bring down its field. And I need that programming done in the next thirty seconds.”
“Not a problem,” Gianeto muttered, concentrating on his station as he entered the commands. A moment later, he looked up. “Done, ma’am. Ready when you are.”
“Just say the word, ma’am,” Witten announced from his station, fingers hovering over the icons that would start the deceleration.
Minishimi watched the display carefully for a moment, then hit the shipwide intercom. “This is Captain Minishimi. All hands brace for collision.” She paused. “It’s been an honor to serve with and fight beside all of you.” She locked eyes with Witten. “Hit the brakes, Francis.”
Minishimi had braced herself, but when the hit came, she was still thrashed violently, both physically and somehow spiritually in a way she couldn’t fathom, and everything went fuzzy in a way that seemed to have little to do with any trauma to her brain and more to do with trauma to reality. Somewhere deep in her consciousness, she raged, knowing that she was wasting time they wouldn’t get back, time that could cost them their lives, but it was as if she were swimming through a sea of glue to get back to herself.
“L…launch missiles!” She tried to scream it, but it choked out as a squeak that she was sure was nearly inaudible. As it turned out, it didn’t matter…she could see that Gianeto had recovered quicker than her and was stabbing the control to launch the pair of Shipbusters.
“Missiles away!” he called, the Tactical display projected around him still hazy and flickering from the near overload of the systems.
“Commander Prieta,” Minishimi was finally able to speak, the words breaking out in a bellow, as if they’d been trying to kick down a door, “can we get the drive back up?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Prieta assured her. “The bypass held and we have fuel containment. The drive is ready, on your command.”
“Lt. Witten, activate the drive field and give us a heading away from the first ship…we don’t want to be nearby when the Shipbuster hits it.”
Witten shook his head, still trying to clear it, then hit the controls before croaking out, “Drive activated, Captain. One g acceleration.”
“One minute till field intercept with the second ramship,” Gianeto told her. “The first Shipbuster is thirty seconds out from the disabled enemy vessel. She is not attempting to evade at this time…I think she’s out of it.” He cocked an eyebrow, looking at the display analytically. “They’re pretty small for Eysselink drive ships. They probably don’t have much in the way of personnel or hardware redundancy.”
“Oh, I think they’ve proven devilishly clever,” Minishimi responded sourly. “They’ve certainly made the most of what they have, and I didn’t think they had that much.”
“Positive detonation on the first Shipbuster,” Gianeto said, nodding with satisfaction as he saw the white globe of the fusion blast appear on his display. “She’s toast, ma’am.” His eyes flickered to the other readout in front of him. “Twenty-five seconds to impact with the other ramship.”
“Anyone who’s into praying,” Higgs murmured, barely audible, “say one for me.”
“Got you covered, Maggie,” Witten said, shooting her a grin.
“Engineering is ready for impact, Captain,” Mehta, the engineering bridge officer, reported. “Commander Prieta says that the emergency interlocks are in place on the antimatter storage pods. He…” Mehta hesitated, stumbling over the words. “He, uh, says that he has perhaps 25 percent confidence they will hold.”
Gianeto’s face twisted into a grimace as he watched his display. “Oh, damn,” he said, mildly. “Captain, we…”
He didn’t finish. Minishimi thought she would be better prepared for the second field collision, but she was discovering that it wasn’t actually possible to prepare for it. If anything, it was worse than the first time, as if the effects were cumulative somehow. And it felt wrong in a way that was hard to express, the way you felt when you injured yourself badly and knew it, the way she’d felt in high school when she’d tore a ligament in her knee playing soccer.
Her vision was blurred and her head spinning, but the first thing she could sense was the acrid scent of the smoke from an electrical fire; and then, vaguely, a crackling of exposed power relays in counterpoint to low, antiphonal moans from others on the bridge.
She tried to shake her head to clear her vision, but couldn’t summon the energy for it…instead, her head lolled and she could feel spittle drifting from her slack mouth and floating away. She concentrated feverishly and finally she was able to blink her eyes clear…and almost immediately wished she hadn’t.
The bridge was a haze of slowly-drifting smoke, punctuated by the wild sparking of overloaded relays, blown out when the energy surge from the successive field intersects had finally jumped the dampers. Worse, the smoke wasn’t being automatically sucked out by the bridge fans, which meant that even the batty backups were offline. Her ‘link’s ear bud was silent and the displays were dark; the only light was the ghostly glow from the chemical light strips that lined the bridge. And worst of all, Francis Witten was floating slack in his harness, a trickle of blood from his nose drifting away in loose globules that hung over him absurdly, unmoved by absent breath.
“Francis!” Larry Gianeto yelled, yanking loose his restraints and lunging across the bridge to the Helm officer. A detached, incredibly calm portion of Minishimi’s shock-numbed brain wondered how the Tactical officer could recover so much more quickly than everyone else from the effects of the collision.
Gianeto grabbed the back of Witten’s acceleration couch, halting his momentum and feeling for the man’s pulse. Under normal circumstances, he could have checked the man’s vital signs via remote access to the sensors in his uniform, but that was down along with everything else on the ship.
“Oh, Jesus, he’s not breathing…” Gianeto moaned helplessly. “He doesn’t have a pulse!”
“Larry,” Minishimi rasped, getting up the strength to pull off her harness. She was remembering something, something even more important than Witten’s condition.
“What the hell happened to him?” Gianeto demanded of no one in particular, hands clenching and unclenching helplessly, head turning back and forth as if he were trying to find someone to help him.
“Larry!” Minishimi said more forcefully and his eyes snapped onto her, finally focusing. “We’ll get him to the medical bay,” she promised. “But before the collision…what were you saying?”
“Oh,” he seemed to come back to reality. “Ma’am,” he said, his voice grim, “I caught a reading of two more ramships coming through the wormhole. They’re headed this way.”
Minishimi closed her eyes, taking in a deep breath, then letting it out. A preternatural calm had descended on her, as her options were stripped away until only one was left. She opened her eyes and fixed Gianeto with a fond gaze.
“Larry,” she said gently, “get the bridge crew to the life pods. The intercoms are down; everything is down, we have to abandon ship.”
She heard a gasp from Maggie Higgs as the woman came to her senses and saw Witten’s body. “Oh my God!” the woman cried. “What happened to him?”
“Probably a cerebral hemorrhage,” Minishimi told her quietly. “Leave him here, Larry. We can’t help him now.”
“There’s nothing we can do, Captain?” Gianeto asked her, agony in his eyes as he clung to Witten’s acceleration couch desperately.
“I’m going to head to engineering and see what the situation is,” she said, shaking her head, “but with enemy ships inbound and no power, we have to get the crew to the pods. I’ll call out to the decks I pass, and you do the same.” She put a hand on his shoulder, squeezing it. “Get moving, Commander.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. He gave Witten once last glance, then looked to the others on the bridge. “Higgs, Mehta, we’re abandoning ship. The comms are down, so Higgs, I want you to take B deck and get the word there; Mehta, take C deck. The Captain is headed for Engineering and I’m going to the hangar bay. Got it?”
“Aye, sir,” they responded, unstrapping from their seats and following him to the bridge hatch.
Gianeto pulled open a panel beside the hatch and worked a hand crank, sliding the normally automatic door open at an agonizingly slow rate. Minishimi felt a desperate urgency start to take hold of her, sure that a ramship was bearing down on them at this very moment, ready to rend them into atoms. But she also knew that the life pods weren’t necessarily salvation from that fate…which was why she had to get to Engineering.
She pushed her way to the front of the crowd and slipped through the portal as soon as Gianeto had it open far enough to fit, then headed for the access tubes.
“Ma’am!” Gianeto’s voice stopped her and she turned back. His face looked pale and drawn in the chemical ghostlight, and his eyes were clouded with fear. “You’ll be taking one of the lifepods from Engineering?”
“Yes, Commander,” she assured him, smiling at his concern. “I’ll meet you on the other side.”
Then she shoved off into the access tube and left the others behind her.
The tubes were eerily silent, without the usual hum and shudder of the ship’s systems, and the silence beat in her ears like a pulse as she sailed through the near-darkness. Joyce Minishimi’s whole body was a mass of aches, her healing chest wound was flaring with fresh pain and her head felt as if it would explode, but she flew through the narrow tube with reckless abandon, knowing that time was running out and feeling as if the passage would never end.
She almost missed the exit for engineering, but managed to brake herself at the last moment, catching a handhold at the expense of a painful wrench to her shoulder and a sharp, stabbing jolt of agony in her chest. She gasped, cradling her arm against her chest, but kept moving, kicking out into the corridor. The hatch to Engineering was closed, and she could see nothing through its viewport, but she didn’t hesitate, moving to the panel beside it and accessing the manual controls. Inside the panel was a hand crank and she worked it with her good arm as quickly as she could, pain shooting through her chest with each turn.
As the hatch to Engineering slowly rolled open, a haze of black smoke dotted with bits of particulate metal drifted out of the chamber. With it, she saw as a sense of horror crept through her, drifted a pair of charred and bloodied bodies. She coughed fitfully as the smoke reached her, and she knew that to last in there, she was going to need a respirator. She went to a rack just outside the hatchway and pulled an emergency breather from it, settling the mask over her face
and pulling the elastic strap over her head, adjusting it automatically as it tried to yank at her hair.
Fresh air filled her lungs and she felt relief for the first time in long minutes. Thinking quickly, she grabbed a spare respirator and a flashlight from the cabinet and pushed off into the smoke-filled chamber. Shining the powerful light around the Engine Room, she could see, despite the smoke, exactly what had happened: the main trunklines had exploded with incredible force from the feedback of the second field collision, probably weakened significantly by the first. And when they’d violently overloaded, they’d burst right through the shielding, turning the armored sheaths into shrapnel that had sliced through everything…and everyone…in the room.
Loose globules of crimson blood floated amid the clouds of smoke and twirling bits of metal like some surreal collage, and at the center of it were a collection of human bodies in torn, bloody and burned blue utility fatigues. She recognized Commander Prieta among them immediately, his dark eyes clouded and sightless. But one of them was still moving…
Pushing off from the partially-open door, Minishimi caught the drifting crewmember and pulled the spare respirator over her face, wincing as she saw the raw, weeping burns that covered half of it. The woman-Chief Grieger she remembered-stirred and coughed violently as the oxygen hit her lungs, thrashing with pain and confusion.
“Chief Grieger!” Minishimi shouted through her breath mask, trying to pin the woman’s arms. “It’s the Captain! Can you hear me?”
“Ma’am!” Grieger calmed down, ceasing her struggling and looking into Minishimi’s eyes. “What…what happened?”
“We had a catastrophic overload, Chief,” the Captain told her, yelling to make sure she understood. “Commander Prieta is dead. The ship is dead in space and we have rammers inbound-I’ve sent the crew to the lifepods, but if those ramships hit us, their fields will tear those lifepods apart. I need the plasma drive up and running to get them some room.”
