by Rick Partlow
Where the normal setup for a Sentinel was an ETC cannon mounted like a pistol, this one carried a plasma gun, which lacked the range of the projectile weapon but wouldn’t run out of ammo as long as the fusion reactor was running. The other hand was articulated but also heavily armored, suitable for use as a massive club. The rest of the mech’s armament was fairly standard: a missile launch pod on one shoulder, a 30mm Vulcan on the other and twin lasers at the hips.
“I knew you liked the plasma gun better,” the Chief said, wringing out the hand cloth again, obviously nervous about presenting the mech to his commanding officer. “And totally honest, we didn’t have a spare ETC we could fit to the mount here.”
“No, no, the weapons load is fine,” Jonathan assured the man, a smile slowly spreading across his face.
It wasn’t what he was used to, and it would be hard getting acclimated to the lack of jump-jets, but Sentinels were chosen by unit commanders for a reason: their command and control suite was unparalleled, they had nearly twice the armor of an assault mech like his Vindicator, a reactor with half again the output, and an automated missile defense system.
“It’s the mech the commanding officer of Wholesale Slaughter should be piloting.”
He spun around, recognizing Valentine Kurtz’s voice and was surprised to see his other platoon leaders with the man—Ford, Paskowski, Hernandez and brevet-Lieutenant Summer Prevatt, all one-and-a-half meters of her defiant in her new officer’s rank, her spiky red hair stuffed under a mech pilot’s black beret. She’d taken the position as First Platoon leader and one of the cross-trained salvage techs had stepped into her spot in the platoon, but replacing someone like Marc Langella wasn’t nearly so easy. She’d been spending hour after hour in the simulator since she was given the job, despite the fact she’d only been discharged from the infirmary a week ago.
“What are you guys doing here?” Jonathan asked them, keeping his tone light, trying to keep the melancholy thoughts of his friend off of his face. He glanced from the platoon leaders to McKee and his band of mechanics. “Is this a surprise party or an intervention?”
A smattering of weak laughs told him it was more the latter, and he sighed in resignation.
“Sir,” Kurtz said with more hesitance than he’d ever heard from the man, “it’s just we kind of been feeling you’re blaming yourself for what happened to Marc, and…”
“You shouldn’t,” Paskowski interrupted, voice stern and definitive. “You were a hundred percent right when you told me I’d done the right thing firing on that Jeuta prick because I had to do it to save more lives. You did the same thing and just because we had a traitor on board doesn’t mean you didn’t make the right decision.”
“I appreciate the work you’ve done on the new mech,” he said to McKee, “and I really appreciate the thought.” That to his officers. “But I’m the commander of this unit, which means everything that goes wrong is my responsibility, whether it’s an act of treason or an act of God.”
“It’s your responsibility, sir,” Hernandez agreed, “but it’s not your fault.” It surprised him to hear her chime in; she was usually tight-lipped and taciturn, not showing up for social functions unless required, not sharing anything personal with the other officers. “Soldiers die in combat, even when everything goes right.”
“Sir,” Prevatt piped up, her voice high-pitched and squeaky in a way that somehow didn’t come over on the comms from her mech, “I was in the Trojan Horse. I was in that damned Quonset hut when Hardrada started killing us, one by one. When Lt. Paskowski’s Scorpion appeared outside the door, I was hoping he’d squash the damn Jeuta bastard like a bug, even if he took me with him. I was sure I was dead. And after the laser fired, I hurt so bad I almost wished I was dead.”
Pain tugged at the corner of her mouth and Jonathan flinched, remembering the red, weeping burns on her left leg and side when he’d gone to the casualty collection point to check on the wounded.
“And not once,” she went on, her pixie voice gaining steel in the telling, “did I ever regret I’d volunteered for this assignment, or the mission. Not once did I ever blame you, sir. I knew you’d come get us out of there, and you did.”
“We’ve accomplished something out here,” Hernandez declared. “Whether we ever find this Terminus Cut or not, we’ve made two different systems safe for thousands of innocent civilians. It’s why we all signed on.”
“I signed on for the money,” Kurtz admitted in a sardonic drawl. “But the people we’ve been helping are a lot like my family and friends back home, and I like working to keep them safe a lot more than I like trying to maintain the ‘balance of power,’ whatever the hell that might be.”
“Me and the crew,” McKee added, gesturing at the other salvage techs, “feel the same way, sir.”
“So do the pilots.”
He didn’t know where the hell Katy had been hiding, because she appeared behind him as if she’d always been there, a hand touching him on the shoulder. She seemed fully recovered from the crash, not even a limp or a stray headache, but she’d been impossible to live with until the Dagda mechanics had gotten her shuttle repaired.
“Well,” she amended with a wry smile, “all the pilots except Acosta. He thinks we’re all nuts and keeps saying he wants to go home.”
When Lyta approached he wasn’t surprised at least; she walked in from the same hatchway to the lift station where the others had come from. She walked, he noticed not for the first time, like a sauntering lioness, a promise of violent action in every step.
“You should already know this,” she told him, giving him a baleful glare, “but the Rangers feel the same way. No one blames you for what happened, including me. You’re our commander.”
“Except when I try to get myself killed,” he reminded her with a rueful grin. “Then you’ll protect me in spite of myself, right?
“We’re heading into the middle of Starkad space,” she said, shaking her head grimly. “I don’t think I’m going to be able to keep that promise.”
“Oh, I really don’t like this,” Osceola murmured. Jonathan had to agree there was a lot not to like.
Gefjon wasn’t quite the center of the Starkad Supremacy, but it was close enough: only three jumps to Baldur and the Supremacy Core on Jormungandr. Close enough for it to be the busiest interstellar hub system in the Five Dominions.
“With all this space,” Katy said, standing beside Jonathan on the bridge, looking over Osceola’s shoulder at the main view screen, “you wouldn’t think it was possible to have a traffic jam.”
Yet here they were, decelerating at one gravity with ten other starships within visual scanning range, no more than a hundred kilometers between them, almost danger-close in terms of space travel.
One mistake, one slip-up, Jonathan thought, feeling an itch running down his back, and we could have an actual collision. It’s fucking ridiculous.
And yet this was a rare jump-point hub, a spatial coordinate where over a dozen of the gravito-inertial lines of force between stars intersected; if you wanted to go anywhere on the other side of Gefjon, you had to travel to one exact location relative to the elliptical plane of the system.
“Literally thousands of ships pass through this system every day,” Osceola said, though Jonathan wasn’t sure if it was an explanation of the situation Katy had brought up or simply an expansion of what he didn’t like about their current circumstances.
“There’s an agreement about licensed military contractors, right?” Terry asked.
He didn’t sound nervous about it, just curious. Jonathan wondered what he was doing on the bridge instead of back in Engineering, since that department was down to a skeleton crew after what had happened with Wihtgar. He seemed at home in the spare acceleration couch off to the side from Kammy’s helm position, and Osceola hadn’t said anything about him being there.
“Yeah,” he answered his brother’s question. “It’s been in place for over a century. All our licensing is in ord
er; we should be fine.”
Terry shrugged as if it would be the same to him either way and Jonathan frowned.
“What the hell is with him lately?” he whispered to Katy. “Is he still freaked out from Wihtgar trying to kill him?”
“Tell you later,” she promised, and he grunted in dissatisfaction.
“How far away are those Starkad patrol ships, Tara?” Osceola asked his tactical officer, fidgeting slightly, as close to nervous as Jonathan had seen the captain on the bridge of his ship.
“Still hanging out around ten thousand kilometers away,” the woman reported, scowling at the sight of the two military vessels on the long-range scanners. “Not getting any closer, but they’re matching velocities with us and the other ships heading for the jump point.”
“We got another hour before main engine shut down,” Kammy supplied from the helm station. “That’s not counting the time we’re going to have to spend waiting around for our turn at the jump point, which might mean another braking burn.”
“You’re sure that business with the New Sainters isn’t going to get your registry flagged with Starkad?” Jonathan asked, for what had to be the fifth time in the last three days. “Or the gunfight at Gateway?”
“The only laws I broke,” Osceola ground out, his strained patience coming through every word, “were local to Canaan, and as big and monolithic as Starkad is, I still don’t think they’re interested in collecting bounties for two-bit independent religious colonies, do you?”
He half expected Lyta to try to smooth things over, but she had decided to spend the transit through the Gefjon system with her Rangers. Jonathan suspected she was staying off the bridge in an effort to emphasize to him her declaration recognizing him as the commander, but her absence bothered him. She was a security blanket, a guardian, and a confidant from his childhood and he’d perhaps come to depend on her too much on this mission.
I need to work on cutting loose, he thought. But he would have been happier working on it once they were out of Starkad space.
“Sir,” Nance said, turning back from the communications console with distress written large across her face, “we’re getting a transmission from one of the Supremacy cruisers, text only. They…” she tripped over the words as if she hated to admit the reality of their existence, “…they’re saying they want to send a customs inspection team over in a shuttle, and we need to give them full access to our cargo, stores, personnel, and ship’s logs. Any resistance will be considered a violation of our charter as a licensed military contractor and will result in our arrest and the forfeiture of the ship and everything in it.” Her uncertain gaze moved from Jonathan to Osceola. “They said we should maintain current course and deceleration profile and their shuttle will match velocities with us after we reach engine cut-off hold for rendezvous with the jump point.” She swallowed hard. “Any deviation from those directions will result in our ship being disabled.”
“Fuck me.” Osceola spat the words.
Jonathan couldn’t even curse. His head was swimming through a sea of possibilities, each worse than the last. This could be routine, some stick-up-his-ass functionary in system Customs pulled with every mercenary company coming through just to show them who was boss. Or they could be just fishing, looking for some violation of the Bremerton Accords so they could slap a huge fine on the mercenary trash. Or they could be after Osceola, either because of the various smuggling and black-market weapons dealing he’d done in the last twenty years, or because they knew who he really was.
Or they had spies deep enough into the Spartan government to realize Wholesale Slaughter was a cover for a Spartan military intelligence operation.
Or they knew who he was.
Or, worst of all, they knew who he was and why he was there.
Katy nudged his arm and he suddenly realized Osceola was staring at him. No, everyone on the bridge was staring at him.
Damn.
“I don’t suppose,” he asked Osceola, “there’s any way this ship could jump before those cruisers could intercept us?”
Kammy snorted, a sound that might have originated in the chest of a Percheron stallion, and Tara brayed a mocking laugh.
“These ain’t pirates or bandits, kid,” Osceola scoffed. “They got missiles that’ll pull thirty, thirty-five gravities for a short range like this, with tungsten penetrators for warheads if they don’t want to just nuke you to vapors. And just in case you think the deflectors have a chance against those, they got laser batteries fed by their own dedicated reactor just as big as our main drive reactor and they’ll core us like a damned apple.”
“I’ll take that as a no,” Jonathan said, the dry humor more of an attempt to calm himself down than to impress the others. “There’s no choice, then.” He nodded to the Commo technician. “Send a reply. Tell them we’re heaving to and preparing to accept their inspection team.”
He felt Katy’s hand slip into his and squeezed it gratefully.
“If there’s anything we need to hide,” Jonathan said, casting a suspicious, sidelong glance at Osceola, “we better get started now.”
11
“What a dump.”
Aleksandr Kuryakin snorted a laugh, less at the frank assessment and more at the fact it had come from Captain Laurent. She had, he reflected, loosened up a bit over the two weeks it had taken them to reach Gefjon. Not enough for him to share his secret with her; that sort of trust wouldn’t come in weeks, if ever. But at least she wasn’t insufferably tentative with every word she spoke, which was a distinct improvement.
She also had a point about the ship. The vessel was functional, but only just. He’d seen it first on the way up from the docking bay, seen the cargo pods carelessly strapped onto pallets half their size, the loose fasteners and restraint cords and food wrappers orbiting in the currents from the air vents.
“Welcome to the Shakak!” the big, goofy-looking First Mate had greeted them with cheerfulness he would have thought forced and fake if it weren’t for the vacant stupidity evident behind his piggy eyes. He hadn’t even looked sideways at the twenty armed and armored Supremacy Marines who’d filed out of the airlock behind Kuryakin and Laurent, smiling at them like the entertainment director on a cruise ship. “I’ll show you to the bridge.”
He’d clanked off in his monstrously oversized magnetic boots, his gait as clumsy and awkward as a toddler just learning to walk, leading them to the hub. His fat, stubby fingers had hovered over the call button for the lift car before he’d finally looked back and seemingly just noticed the Marines, then looked comically at the lift door, realizing they wouldn’t all fit inside.
“Call the car for us,” Kuryakin had supplied impatiently. “My troops will take the hub tunnel and inspect the ship.”
Mithra alone knew what the Marines would find , but what he was seeing on the way to the bridge from the hub only confirmed his initial observations. Maintenance hatches hung loose or were missing altogether, probably stowed away somewhere because the power junctions they’d covered shorted out often enough to make it not worth the effort to conceal them. Bypasses and splices hung out of the open niches, held together with tape and good wishes, and carbon dust hung in the air from jury-rigged repairs. About a quarter of the light panels were dark and inoperative, and if the emergency seals for the bridge had ever worked, they certainly didn’t at the moment, not with the guts of the motors hanging out.
He hadn’t seen any of the crew along the way to the bridge except for Johansen, the First Mate, but there were eight of them on the bridge. Most were strapped into the acceleration couches at their stations, except for the man he assumed was the captain of the ship from his position beside the empty command station and one other…the one he’d come here to see.
The captain was everything Kuryakin had expected from the master of this junk heap. He was ragged, a piece of leather chewed up and spat out by life, his hair long and stringy and streaked with grey, his flight jacket threadbare and worn at the elbows, a
s if it weren’t important enough for him to have another fabricated. Kuryakin wasn’t sure how it was possible to slouch in free-fall, but Osceola was managing it, one elbow hooked around the armrest of the captain’s chair, legs crossed. There was apathy in his stance and in his eyes so pure and unadulterated it couldn’t have been faked.
“Colonel Kuryakin,” Johansen said, mangling his name worse than his instructors in basic training had over forty years ago, “this is Captain Donner Osceola.”
The introduction was pointless, a formality they could have skipped to save time, but time spent on this ship wasn’t wasted, so Kuryakin nodded curtly to the spindly, leathery captain.
“This is my aid, Captain Laurent,” he added politely and just as pointlessly. He knew she would have felt slighted if he hadn’t mentioned her, though, and he didn’t need her crawling back into her shell. “It is my duty to inspect all licensed private military contractors before allowing them to pass through Supremacy territory.” He smiled genially. “We can’t take the chance of our enemies using the Bremerton Accords as a cover to smuggle their troops past our borders, can we?”
“Do all Supremacy Customs officers have such active imaginations, Colonel Kuryakin?”
It was him. Even seeing the news footage, Kuryakin hadn’t been one hundred percent sure, but seeing that taut smile, hearing his voice, it was as if he were seeing Jamie Brannigan’s visage laid over that of his late wife. Kuryakin was a man used to reining in his emotions, keeping them far from his face, but it was hard this time. He wanted to yell, he wanted to crow, he wanted to leap upward and bounce off the overhead.
Instead, he forced himself to regard the younger man with the sort of annoyed disinterest and vague distaste a Supremacy military officer might show for typical mercenary scum.
“You must be the leader of this colorfully named mercenary company, then,” he said, shaping the words with obvious disdain.
