An Honorable Defense Book 1 Crisis of Empire

by David : Thomas, T Thomas Drake

  On the plus side, he was back in the hills he loved. He had been planning a vacation ramble up here for the last three months, hadn’t he? Time away from the grinding details of the office. Time to breathe fresh mountain air. The vacation had just come a little sooner this year.

  As his pace cycled into a walk, Bertingas began whistling. Quietly.

  Chapter 12

  Hildred Samwels: UNDER ATTACK

  Samwels always expected to hear echoes. The enclosed space where Gemini Base docked and repaired its squadrons was big enough—3,000 meters in diameter—but it had no atmosphere. Of course, pressurizing this huge volume would make it easier to work on the ships. Anything small enough to fit in the docking bay was transatmospheric, designed and built for direct touchdown on a planet’s surface. Having some air pressure in here would simplify the procedures for opening access hatches, testing fluid lines, applying paints, and doing delicate work without tie clumsy suit gloves.

  But, of course, not even the Pact’s Central Fleet could afford to put 14 billion cubic meters under pressure.

  It would be better—not optimum, but second best—if they could get a real, hard vacuum in the bay. Clean nothing, the very opposite of pressure. But even that would cost too much.

  So sparks and smokes from the electrostatic welders, leaks from the air curtains and pressure locks, fumes from adhesives and cleaners, spills from the ships’ environmental and sanitary systems—it all floated through this space in a light fog. Every hour or two he had to wipe his faceplate, creating a smear and bringing his glove away damp and slippery. It was like working in a toilet.

  Of course, a captain and an admiral’s aide didn’t normally pull duty on the docks. But Samwels wanted a private word with Captain Bennington, of the freighter on the third resupply cycle. Bennington’s next stop would be Palaccio, and Samwels wanted to commission him, privately, unofficially, in the search for Mora Koskiusko. It had been five days since she had disappeared there.

  Samwels especially wanted Bennington to probe the connection between the Arachnids and Mora’s disappearance, at which Spile’s envoy had hinted. Hildred Samwels was beginning to suspect that something was really rotten on Palaccio.

  “Hand me that skip gauge, would you, Captain?”

  A gloved paw with six fingers and two thumbs stuck out of the guts of the mass inverter. When Samwels was two seconds slow in finding and passing the right tool, all eight digits wiggled impatiently.

  “Thank you, Sir,” the mechanic said when Samwels found and passed the gauge. Just on the edge of insubordination.

  The little Capuchins in his work crew didn’t seem to mind, particularly, the slimy fog in the docking bay. They were permanently mad at everything.

  Capuchins were a continual wonder to him. Aside from the even-fingered hand, they were dead ringers for the Earthly species Cebus capucinus. They had the small, lithe bodies covered with long, reddish hair. They had the prehensile tails and flat faces, with beards and cowls of black or gray tufts. They had the quick hands and treetop agility, making them perfect for mechanical work in tight quarters and varying gravity conditions.

  They might have come straight from the long-vanished Amazon forests, except they had evolved on a planet more than 4,000 lightyears distant in realspace. Their similarity to Earth monkeys had caused Human scholars to run in circles, inventing new theories of evolutionary convergence and spaceborne proteins as the cradle of all life.

  Differences showed up, however—mostly in the psychological dimension. The Capuchins were not social. They had not a hint of the monkey troupe in their background. Each was a stalwart individual: suspicious, thorny, superior.

  And the Capuchins were smarter than Humans—in some ways. What tests could be devised showed that even the slowest among those who would work in the Pact scored over 200 points on the Human IQ scale, certified geniuses. The bright ones were off the scale, untestable by any instrument. But all that capability was intellectual: memory retention, comprehension, computation, and organization. They were morons along the dimensions of creativity, social skills and interaction, or empirical application. Capuchins made fine mathematicians, clerks, and mechanics—and that was about it.

  If their social life and creative impulses had developed in concert with their raw intelligence, the Capuchins might have conquered hyperspace, opened up the star clusters, fought their wars, and eventually formed the Pact. Instead of the Humans.

  Or, given the demands of a social order and its necessary curbs on the unpredictable genius, the Capuchins’ great intellects might have been leavened. They would probably have ended up no brighter, along any psychological dimension than Humans.

  Still, for all the unveiled contempt they showed him, Samwels was glad to have a Capuchin working in the bowels of this cruiser, PPS Dawnlight. A sick mass inverter called for a specialist, one who could juggle transcendental equations in his head and oppose six fingers and two thumbs on one hand.

  The mass inverter’s theory of operation was simple. It canceled the volumes of empty space inside and among atoms. Whatever lay within the inverter’s sphere of influence shrank, instantly and in perfect proportion, inside its own Schwartschild radius. This artificial concentration of mass popped through the thin fabric of spacetime into another part of the hyperspace probability that constituted a cluster. The stars and planets that constituted a Pact cluster were not adjacent in realspace but in the folds of hyperspace.

  That was the easy part. The trick came in distorting the collapse field so that the pilot could predict just where, in hyperspace, the ship was going. When its distorters started to drift off synch, the inverter became unpredictable and couldn’t jump. The Dawnlight, disabled this way, could move out of the docking bay on her inertial thrusters and even push around the Kali system—both planets. But she wasn’t going anywhere useful.

  The Capuchin poked his head, absurdly small by Human standards, out of the inverter’s main space. His helmet, like those worn by all his kind, was transparent so that he could display the gray-and-black status banding on his cowl.

  “I can’t fix this thing.” The Capuchin scowled.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “You wouldn’t understand, Captain.”

  “Try me.”

  “Well, the Theta function overlap should be in three-phase at sixty degrees, except the Lambda is holding irregular on two channels. You with me so far?”

  “Sure.”

  “Irregular bandwidth, irregular phasing, so we can’t hold in the sixties as we should.”

  “You know what’s foxing the Lambda?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “What then?”

  “Time.”

  “Oh.”

  The Capuchin was going to be inscrutable. Which probably meant it didn’t really know. Samwels had enough experience with Capuchin vanity not to push it too far into admitting ignorance or a mistake. They were ornery enough to bite when piqued. And they held a grudge long enough for this one to get to atmosphere so it could shed the helmet and then bite.

  “There’s your supply freighter, Captain.” It waved a gloved paw at the dark shape of the Salmo Iridium cutting through the bay’s access field. “Why don’t you go pester Bennington and quit hanging over my shoulder?”

  “All right,” Samwels smiled, making sure that he showed his teeth. “And why don’t you just knuckle down and fix this thing. ‘Time!’ When did anything quantifiable ever stump a Capuchin?”

  The scowl deepened, and also showed teeth. “Don’t play psychological games on me, Captain.”

  “I wouldn’t think of it.”

  Samwels backed out of the access hatch, sighted on the docking grapples toward which the freighter was heading, and kicked off with his packjet. Twenty meters out, he remembered to light up his radar beacon so the scooter and tow traffic wouldn’t run him down. Any ships moving under thrusters and magnetics, however, were his problem to avoid. They couldn’t spin that much mass just to keep f
rom impacting a Human-sized object, even if he did have an inherent right-of-way within enclosed space.

  This was a busy morning inside the docking bay.

  Gemini had put out six destroyers, in three sections of two, and two cruisers on routine patrols in the cluster. The remaining fourteen destroyers and six cruisers in Koskiusko’s squadron were inside, either for crew stand-down or repairs. It was practically a full house.

  The admiral chewed about the repair cycle, which got deeper and deeper every quarter. What he chewed on was Samwels’ butt. The way appropriations from Central Center were trending—and likely to falter even more, what with confusion over the succession—the repair situation was only going to get worse.

  The markings on the freighter, now that she was under the bay’s klieg lights, were not exactly what Samwels had expected. Bennington’s ship had a lateral line in dusky red, with the dorsal surfaces speckled in gold on powder blue. They were the transit line’s colors. Samwels would never have noticed, except for the comment Paol Bennington once made, about them miming the rainbow trout of Placer Colorado, which were the his favorite fish to catch and eat. Except the lateral line on this freighter was not red but a dull brown. The speckles were more yellow than gold, too.

  Now, what kind of stellar radiation, or atmospheric abrasion, or nebular gas titration would be likely to so affect the ceramic dyes which saturated the ship’s hull metal? Samwels was still trying to figure it out as he braked for rendezvous with the forward manway lock.

  He considered for two seconds the possibility that the freighter was not the Salmo. Her access transponder must be giving the right codes, however, or she would have closed down the entire base. Perhaps it was a different ship from the same line, an older ship perhaps, that Captain Thwaite on Palaccio had hired at the last minute. That might make Samwels’ call a bit embarrassing—and his morning in the docking bay a waste of time.

  As he spun on a timed jet burst, the ship slid into its grapples and the aft cargo hatch began to open. That was faster than usual for radio checks. Someone up in the Comm Shack must have been on her toes and cleared the ship before it had penetrated the access fields.

  Samwels reached the lock handholds, tugged away the last bit of his forward momentum, and started to dial for pressure. The telltales stayed dark. The lock was shut down.

  The first of the ten-meter cargo pods was coming out of the open hatch aft. With a curse under his breath, Samwels pushed off toward it, not bothering with the packjet. He was rehearsing the bawling out he meant to give the ship handlers for lousy portside procedures.

  As he glided aft, the pod drifted sideways toward the base’s cargo crews, who scattered before the plowing mass. No tether lines, no bounce pads, not a finger to keep it from ricocheting out into the busy docking bay. Hildred Samwels cursed aloud inside his helmet and decided he was going to lift somebody’s license.

  The plastic pod split open before it hit the base’s inner wall. Instead of puffing out atmosphere and packaged goods, it spilled men in vacuum suits. Men armed with repulsor rifles.

  The intruders spread out quickly. They shot at the retreating freight handlers. One of the riflemen faced an oncoming scooter and picked off the ensign riding it with a single plasma-banded bead. Another saw Samwels drifting down on them and shouldered his weapon.

  Samwels did an impossible pirouette in mid-trajectory and hurled himself against the hatch coaming. The shooter was a second behind him. The string of glass beads the rifleman fired clanged off the hull a foot from Samwels’ helmet and exploded in crystals at a flat angle away from him.

  “Security. Security.” Samwels thumb-clicked the master override on his helmet radio. “All sections. Intruders at Port 14. Firefight in progress.” Within three seconds, radio chatter picked up about two hundred percent, backed by the internal alarm siren.

  Rather than give the man with the rifle another shot at himself, Samwels shoved off from the hull for the ensign’s scooter, drifting twenty meters away. He wasn’t thinking of escape; he wanted a ramming weapon.

  Four bead streams bracketed him on the long fall for it. Three missed and the last one cut his suit across the calf. He felt a sudden coldness there—vacuum, shock, and evaporating blood. He didn’t pause but snagged the scooter and keyed it over. A mist of red and sticky filaments drifted up around his knee.

  A fifth fine of glass beads clanged on the machine’s thrust canister and exploded it, putting the vehicle solidly out of commission. Samwels was an upright target in a shooting gallery. He braced for the next shot, which would surely take him in the chest.

  “Damn you!” shrieked a high, thin voice on the proximity channel. A small, silvery ball of suit cloth flashed by him going the other way, toward the knot of intruders. The distinguishing feature was the clear acrylic helmet over a cowl of gray and black hair. One arm, bent behind the Capuchin’s back, worked frantically at something. Before the captain could figure out what it was doing, intruders, Capuchin, and pod halves evaporated in a yellow flare.

  Later, at his leisure, Samwels decided the mechanic had used an electrostatic welder to burn through, alternately, the small green bottle of emergency oxygen tucked into his suit’s environment unit and the fuel tank of his packjet. Only a Capuchin could have performed the mental calculations to know, without looking, how many searing touches were needed to breach the two tanks at the precise moment ending that long jump. And only a Capuchin would know why an antisocial genius would sacrifice himself to save the life of a Human officer he didn’t even much like.

  But those thoughts came later. Before the expanding ball of flame and gases dissipated, Samwels had snagged a loose repulsor rifle from one of the dead intruders and kicked off the scooter toward the open cargo hatch.

  Inside, other pods had split apart, and more suited men were setting up a portable plasma gun. It was a twenty-megawatt model, with a serious enough heat plume to do real damage to the unprotected hulls arrayed around the docking bay. Samwels picked his shots, taking two of the gunners in the helmets and then, as his approach vector shortened, making the rest keep their heads down.

  When he had the chance, he put random pellets into the still-sealed pods at the back of the freighter’s hold. Sometimes he was rewarded with puffs of air and cereal grains, sometimes with fresh blood crystals.

  Just as he drifted into the hatchway on the last of his momentum, and fired off the last of his rifle’s ammunition drum, the first of the Fleet’s Marines charged out of Port 14.

  The destroyer in the dock across the way unlimbered its uncollimated plasma battery and put a single shot into the freighter’s drive unit. The recoil from that shook the hatchway around Samwels and his Marines as they descended in a swirl on the remaining fighters. He prayed aloud that the gunnery officer on that destroyer wouldn’t try a second shot for a clean kill on the bandit ship. And that the flight crew aboard the freighter wouldn’t try to get away by a single hyperspace jump. Either one, from inside the docking bay, would blow the air-curtained manways leading into the base and gut Gemini’s relatively fragile interior.

  The vibrations from that single plasma discharge were damped out by a deeper, more ominous tone, a deep buzzing from inside Samwels’ left mastoid. He had only heard it twice before, as a test. Gemini Base was about to crash-launch its full complement of destroyers and cruisers.

  In his peripheral vision, Samwels could see the translucent flex tubes, fore and aft on the ships in cradles, tremble with the impact of hundreds of feet and hands. Sailors, gunners, engineers, trackers, officers, programmers, magnetic handlers, navigators, talkers, captains, and cooks were climbing cheek-to-butt up to their ship stations.

  Was Admiral Koskiusko overreacting to the threat of an intruder fire team loose in the docking bay?

  Possibly.

  But why now? Samwels had the situation almost under control aboard the false freighter.

  Or was worse damage being done somewhere else in the base? Holy Trimurti—! Was Gemin
i being evacuated!

  “We’re holding this deck, Captain.” A Marine sergeant saluted at his elbow.

  “Well, get your men under cover. The base is about to dump the squadrons.”

  “Yes, Sir!”

  “Samwels to the Plot,” said the bug behind his ear. “On the double—Sir.”

  “On my way,” he replied on the command circuit. “What’s the situation?” Samwels spun on his heel and slapped the packjet. The blast doors had automatically come down on all the air-curtained cargo ports, so he was going to make a 200-meter jump to the nearest security lock. It would take him thirty-two seconds. Still, it was the fastest way—unless the launch went off before then and filled the bay with a maelstrom of reaction mass at near plasma temperatures.

  “Globular attack,” was all the talker had time to tell him.

  It was enough. The War College taught that the globular attack—a large force of ships dropping simultaneously out of hyperspace around a tactical objective—was almost unbeatable. The only defense was a crash-launch, meeting inward force with outward. The trouble was, any competent attacker could calculate the maximum at-rest number of ships, n, which the objective could dock. Then pour n+1 ships into the globule.

  Twenty-five seconds into his jump, the security lock started to close. The hull metal door slid left to right. In the last meters of his trajectory, Samwels skewed his shoulders right to left and ignored the proper braking bursts. He scraped through the gap at 9.75 meters per second and still accelerating. The impact against the far wall of the lock gouged him in the ribs, smashed his radio and the suit’s environmental controls, and put a star crack in his helmet shell. The slow, whistling leak was a mosquito-whine in his ears.

  The crack would be serious, even deadly, in any other circumstances. In these, however, he planned to be out of the suit and on the run two seconds after the lock finished cycling. The gobby red mass along the back of his right leg was more of a worry. When the suit sealers pulled free, that was going to bleed like a butchered pig. Hurt, too.