Tanis Richards: Shore Leave - A Hard, Military, Science Fiction Adventure (Aeon 14: Origins of Destiny)
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There was no way around it. The flying breach was necessary.
Catching up to the Jones, and then matching v would be a long, slow, and likely impossible maneuver. To achieve zero delta-v, they would have already had to begin braking—and then, if whoever was flying the Jones picked up speed, they would have to turn the Wind around and boost once more to match.
A forced match-n-latch could take days, and when the prey had better weapons than the hunters, it wasn’t possible at all.
All this bucket has are a few point defense weapons for shooting at rocks that get too close, Tanis thought ruefully, considering the damage the Kirby Jones could inflict on the Wind.
On top of that, there was no way that the Jones couldn’t see them by now. Even with the Norse Wind headed straight for them, the halo glare of the freighter’s engines would be obvious even if there was a half-baked NSAI running scan on the TSF patrol boat.
However, some things were working in their favor. Harm had been true to his word, and no pursuit had originated from Vesta as yet. That he could blind the base’s sensors, or hack their STC reporting so well that no one had spotted the Wind boosting after the Jones was both impressive and terrifying.
STC scan was supposed to see all and know all. The fact that two ships could blast across the asteroid belt with not a single comm message telling them to slow down and get into normal shipping lanes terrified Tanis. It shattered her belief that the traffic in Sol was at all well managed.
One would expect that, simply because you could see all the ships boosting around in the system, you knew what they were up to. But it was apparent that with a hundred million ships—station-to-station taxies, freighters, miners, tugs, and military craft—no one really kept an eye on it all.
She wondered if someone would change protocol on Vesta after this, or if whatever gap Harm had exploited would remain open for the MICIs to use.
Tanis scowled.
Tanis scowled, wondering where on the ship’s hull the solid chemical boosters would be mounted. They had a distinctive shape, and she’d spent no small amount of time staring at the Wind.
A smile crept onto Tanis’s lips.
* * * * *
“Stars,” Liam muttered as he pulled his helmet off after the airlock resealed behind him. “It’s bad enough lugging that shit around out there, but I don’t think the prior crew ever put these EV suits through a san cycle. I think something died inside this one.”
Seamus made a gagging sound as he pulled his helmet off. “Yeah, there was a few sticky spots in mine. At one point, I had to piss, and the suit detected my discomfort and offered to do a san hookup. I almost climbed out into vacuum.”
Tanis suppressed a laugh as Connie held up a hand and said, “OK, seriously, that’s terrifying. I don’t want to hear another word.”
“Let’s just say it was worse than getting mugged after we got back to Vesta,” Seamus said with a shudder as he pulled off his EV suit.
“You got mugged?” Connie asked, brows raised. “Why didn’t you say something?”
Seamus glanced at Connie, then Tanis. “Well, Sergeant…it just didn’t seem like it was noteworthy—what, with everything else that was going on. Whoever it was just grabbed my bag and ran off.”
“What?” Liam asked. “I thought the MPs took it from you.”
“No,” Seamus shook his head. “It happened right before they picked us up. I told them about it, but they didn’t care. Bugs the piss out of me, too, I had grabbed a cool ship from—”
He suddenly stopped, his face turning red.
“Seamus, I get the feeling there’s something you need to tell us,” Connie said, folding her arms across her chest.
“Uhh…” the E-3 stammered. “The captain of the Wind had a really cool old ship model in his quarters. Not big, was—”
“An old Marsian cruiser?” Tanis asked, doing her best not to lash out at Seamus.
“Uhh…yes, Commander Richards.”
Tanis caught Connie’s gaze. “Well, I guess we know why they finally cut and run from Vesta. They had what they needed.”
“Thanks to dumb and dumber, here,” Connie said, shooting arrows with her eyes at the two E-3s.
Tanis drew herself up. “Well, on the plus side, if Seamus and Liam hadn’t lifted it off the Wind, our SWSF friends would have disappeared long before we ever figured out what was going on.”
“Is that why you were going to Ceres?” Connie asked Seamus. “You were going to pawn that thing off somewhere? Did you know there was a quantum core inside it?”
“A what? Seriously?” Seamus asked, while Liam slapped him on the back of the head.
“You’re such an idiot.”
“OK, OK,” Tanis held up her hands. “Recriminations can wait, and if we’re all still in the TSF when this is done, maybe some discipline.”
“Really know how to boost someone’s spirits, Commander,” Seamus muttered, earning him another glare from Connie.
“Are the boosters secure?” Tanis asked, changing the subject.
“Yeah,” Liam nodded vigorously. “We set them in the tug’s port and starboard grapples, and welded them in place. Those things can hold a starship while the tug thrusts, so they should be able to hold the boosters.”
Tanis nodded. “I imagine you’re right.”
“They’ll hold,” Connie said with a nod. “Better than your first plan, anyway.”
* * * * *
Ten minutes later, Tanis, Marian, Susan, Yves, and Lukas were all crammed into the tug’s tiny cabin. It only had two seats, which Tanis and Marian occupied. Behind them, the three members of Marian’s breach team had wrapped themselves in cargo webbing—which everyone hoped would hold.
Each member of the group wore medium combat armor—the best that Marian had been able to source from her cousin on such short notice.
It was powered enough to make the armor feel light, but if they came up on anyone in heavy armor, they’d be in trouble.
Good thing the Kirby Jones isn’t the roomiest of ships, Tanis thought. Makes it less likely that our friends over there will be using anything meaty.
At that, Tug 82-CF released from the Norse Wind and fell back into the ship’s engine wash.
Now that they were no longer attached to the Norse Wind, the force pus
hing Tanis back in her seat disappeared, and the ship began a slow tumble as it continued on toward their target.
The Kirby Jones still lay ten thousand kilometers away. Scan showed that the Norse Wind had a delta-v of three hundred and twenty kilometers per hour, which meant the freighter would pass the Jones in just over thirty seconds, closely followed by the tug tumbling in its wake.
Tanis activated 82-CF’s stabilizer jets, spun the tug so they were facing forward once more, and then activated the two solid boosters held in the tug’s grapples.
Six gs slammed the tug’s occupants forward, each one of them praying that their restraining harnesses and cargo webbing would hold. The tug began to slew to starboard, and Tanis realized that the boosters were ever so slightly misaligned. She altered the port side grapple’s position, and the tug began to right itself.
Marian said as they passed within five thousand kilometers of the Jones.
The Wind’s meager ES shields barely shed any energy from the shot, and an explosion bloomed from the freighter. The ship ceased burn, and fired lateral thrusters to move away from the Jones.
Tanis prayed it would be enough for whoever was flying the Jones to cease firing on the Wind. She didn’t have long to wait for her answer, as a beam streaked out from the Jones and struck the tug, blowing away the port side solid booster.
“Shit!” someone screamed.
Instantly, the tug went from a nominally controlled trajectory, to spinning like a top through space.
Tanis rotated the grapple holding the remaining booster, and flipped the direction of its burn in an attempt to slow the mad tumble the ship was in.
It worked for a second, then the booster tore away.
The tug was still spinning one revolution per second, and Tanis barely had time to register that they’d somehow managed to remain on course for their target when Tug 82-CF slammed into the port side of the Kirby Jones.
HELL OF A BREACH
STELLAR DATE: 01.24.4084 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Kirby Jones, Outer rim of Main Asteroid Belt
REGION: Vesta, Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
“Commander!” a voice cried out, jarring Tanis back to consciousness. “Are you injured?”
Tanis looked at the readouts on her HUD, and, seeing that there were no red bioindicators, said, “I’m good.”
“Well, we breached,” the voice said, and Tanis recognized it as Marian’s. There was nothing on Tanis’s optics, but when she tried to move, it became apparent that the tug’s cabin had filled with impact foam.
A moment later, the foam began to feel softer, and then it was sloughing away to form a half-meter-deep puddle in one corner of the cabin.
“Lukas,” Marian ordered, turning in her seat to eye her team. “Get that hatch open, let’s see where we’ve landed ourselves.”
“With my luck, we’re probably smashed halfway through my cabin,” Susan muttered as she disentangled herself from the cargo webbing and set to helping Yves get free, while Lukas wrestled with the cabin’s rear hatch.
Tanis pulled off her harness and rose to her feet, which—given the Jones’s current quarter-g acceleration, and the tug’s position—had her standing on the tug’s left interior bulkhead.
A chorus of affirmative responses came back, but Darla let out a worried sigh just for Tanis to hear.
Lukas got the cabin’s door opened, and the tug’s atmosphere rushed out in a single burst of air that flung the hatch wide. On one side of the opening, Tanis could see starlight, but on the other was the port-side passage that ran to the rear airlock.
Susan glanced around the side of the tug.
Darla said, a devious smile appearing in Tanis’s mind.
Three minutes later, the ES field was up, and Lukas had part of the bulkhead torn off, ready to trigger the door’s manual release.
As she shouted the last word across the Link, Lukas pulled the manual release, forcing the door open, and revealing the muzzles of a half-dozen rifles, held by a half-dozen soldiers.
One of them got a shot off, a kinetic round that ricocheted off Marian’s armor before the net fired.
All tugs carried safety nets, used for anything from search and rescue operations, to snagging space junk before it hit a ship or station. The nets fired from twenty centimeter launchers, and packed enough punch to knock over a shuttle.
When the webbing hit the enemy troops, it picked them up, wrapped them in a ball, and carried them twenty meters down the corridor on the far side of the door.
Tanis sighed, half-tempted to do just that, but she knew they had to get to the bridge. Once there, she could activate the overrides and take control of her ship.
“Get their weapons,” Marian ordered Lukas and Susan aloud. “First hint of trouble, just waste them. So far as I can tell, they’re pirates that have stolen a sovereign TSF vessel and attacked a TSF officer. We’re totally within our rights to kill them or just dump them out the airlock.”
Tanis knew that wasn’t exactly true, but close enough that it seemed to have a calming effect on the enemies wrapped up in the net.
“Go ahead,” Lukas grunted at the enemies. “I hate fucking guard duty; I only need half an excuse to waste you.”
Tanis grinned behind her helmet’s mask, and swept through the side corridor to the ship’s central passageway. She stopped at the intersection, and deployed a probe, letting it sweep ahead.
&nbs
p; Fifteen meters forward, the passage widened right before it got to the bridge. This was done on purpose to give defenders a place to set up in case they were boarded.
To that end, the bulkheads were reinforced, and would provide enough cover for shooters to hold out for some time.
Tanis didn’t plan to wait long enough for their weapons fire to burn holes in her ship. She pulled out two pulse grenades and nodded to Marian.
The soldiers nodded, and Tanis drew her arms back, lobbing the grenades high, the right one angled toward the left, and the left toward the right. She gave them a spin, and managed to get them around the corners, out of direct line of sight of her team.
That was when Darla triggered them to detonate.
Concussive pulses focused in the corners, slamming into the enemies hiding there—which turned out to be two on each side. The force caused them to half fall, half stumble away from the bulkheads, right into sustained kinetic fire from Marian and Yves.
Tanis joined in, and in less than ten seconds, all four were down.
Yves took up a position in one of the shielded locations, covering the intersection, while Tanis strode forward, eyes locked on the bridge’s sealed door.
One of the fallen enemies raised his rifle toward her, but Tanis didn’t hesitate, firing a round into his head, ending the threat.
“Toss ‘em!” Marian screamed at the three survivors.
Two threw their weapons aside. The third didn’t move, and Tanis revised her assessment: two survivors.
Then she was at the bridge’s door, where she placed an Infil Kit on the panel, and shouldered her rifle, ready to end whoever had stolen her ship.
Twenty agonizing seconds later, the doors slid aside, and she took in the tableau in an instant.
Two soldiers were on either side of the door, and ahead was Admiral Kiaan, with an arm around Deering’s throat, and a pistol pressed against her temple.
The soldier on the left fired, his shot hitting Tanis’s rifle. She saw the barrel bend, and flung the ruined weapon toward the shooter with one hand, while drawing her sidearm with her other.