by Terry Mixon
“We’re doing everything we can,” Brad promised the OSE Command Constable. Their first encounter had been hostile, but the man seemed to genuinely care about the people under his protection.
Strangers probably weren’t so lucky, but that was par for the course for small communities on the back end of nowhere.
“Keep me advised,” he continued. “What’s our current safe radius, just in case?”
Daskalov snorted.
“We’ve cleared the industrial sector, so if you could keep it to the warehouses, that would be great,” he said dryly. “Of course, that nerve gas isn’t exactly known for being stopped by much of anything. I had my HQ research into it. The only way we’re going to stop its spread is by flushing the air from the entire sector.”
“I’m not planning on letting it get that far, Constable,” Brad promised. “I’ll let you know.”
Leaving Daskalov to his thankless task, the Commodore found Vaughn approaching him. The Sergeant still looked as unflappably calm as ever, which Brad was starting to realize meant the man was potentially scared out of his wits.
“Okay, boss,” Vaughn greeted him quietly. “I’ve got good news, bad news, and ‘I can’t believe I’m suggesting this’ news.”
That didn’t sound promising.
“Lay it out,” Brad ordered.
“Good news: we disabled the tripwire grid at the exits and we think we can disarm the thermobaric bombs.”
Brad wanted to sigh in relief, but somehow he knew he wasn’t going to like the other shoe that was coming.
“The bad news is that the people who put this together were sick fucking bastards who knew their chemical weapons,” Vaughn said bluntly. “Once the VX-65 was assembled, it started eating through its container. We’ve got maybe thirty minutes before we’ve got lethal levels loose in here…and about an hour before it eats its way into the main concourse despite anything we can do. Assuming there’s no lovely extra holes we don’t know about.”
“So, we can run…if we’re prepared to write off everything OSE can’t evacuate,” Brad concluded. “Which means we aren’t running.”
“I could make an argument for it, but…yeah,” Vaughn agreed. “I’m not sure First Oberon’s people would manage to contain it to one sector. They’d lose this one at least and potentially the ones next door as well. Five, maybe six thousand dead, depending on how quickly they evacuated.”
“I don’t like that option. What’s your suggestion?” Brad asked.
“VX-65 dissociates back into harmless components at sufficient temperature in an anoxic environment,” his Sergeant told him. “Such as the conditions in the immediate aftermath of a high-compression thermobaric bomb.”
“So, their own weapons would undo each other?” Brad said. That seemed unusually incompetent.
“The bomb and the VX are quite handily separated,” Vaugh explained. “The bomb would mostly only kill everyone in the hospital site and blast the wreckage into orbit. The gas is designed to screw the people who come in to disable the bomb—we were supposed to find and disarm the bomb.”
“But you can use the bombs to disable the VX?”
“Yeah…but I’m going to need all of them.”
Brad winced.
“How bad?”
“If I’m careful, I think I can only wreck the hospital site itself,” Vaughn said quietly.
“The only part of this place we’re actually contracted to protect.” Brad sighed. “Set it up, Sergeant. I need to talk to our employer.”
The NCO coughed delicately.
“If we don’t do this, boss, well…five, maybe six thousand dead,” he repeated.
“I know,” Brad snapped. “I’m not going to let the good doctor tell me no, but I’d like to at least tell my client before I blow their facility to kingdom come!”
“Commodore, please tell me that your people are all right!”
“We’re fine,” Brad told Leonhardt. “We identified everything before it become a threat, but we have a new problem.”
“Can you get out? I’m more concerned about preserving lives than anything else right now,” she said rapidly.
“So am I,” he said grimly. “There is a stockpile of VX-65 rigged to blow inside your hospital site, Dr. Leonhardt. Enough to gas about three sectors and probably kill over five thousand people—and that’s if OSE evacuates promptly.”
Leonhardt was silent.
“We did not order that,” she said carefully.
Brad couldn’t help himself. He laughed.
“Doctor, I’m pretty sure everyone realizes the bombs and nerve gas were here to destroy your attempt to build a hospital and kill you. No one thinks the stockpile of WMDs had been on layaway for you.”
“What do we do?” she asked.
“We’ve deactivated most of the triggering mechanisms and we can evac, but…are you familiar with VX-65 at all, Dr. Leonhardt?”
“If it was a bioweapon, I’d know something, but chemical WMDs are far outside my area of expertise,” she told him. “If you can get out, get out!”
“Doctor…the nerve gas is going to destroy its containers in the next hour,” he said quietly. “If we don’t do something to counteract it, it will kill thousands. I can’t stand by and let that happen.”
She was silent again.
“What can you do?”
“To destroy VX requires super-high temperatures and a lack of oxygen,” Brad told him. “It’ll help get rid of anything left if we blast the remnants into space, too.”
“That sounds destructive.”
“It is. I can save this colony, Dr. Leonhardt, but I have to destroy your hospital to do it.”
There was a different tone to the silence this time, and it ended in a soft chuckle.
“No, you don’t, Commodore Madrid. My hospital is the people and equipment on the freighters you delivered. The space you have to destroy is just that: a space. An empty void.
“Do what you must.”
“Make it happen,” Brad ordered Vaughn. “How many people do you need?”
“One fire team,” the Sergeant replied instantly. “One fire team to help move and set the bombs, one fire team to make sure my commanding officer is outside the Everdarkened blast radius. Move, Commodore. The tripwire is down and this is not your place anymore.”
Brad shook his head.
“This was never my place, Sergeant; it was just where I happened to end up.” He offered his hand to the NCO. “You can do it?”
Vaughn took his grip and shook firmly.
“I can do it.”
“Don’t lose anyone,” Brad told him. “No suicidal heroics. We don’t get paid for that.”
The Sergeant laughed.
“Boss, I don’t believe we’re getting paid for this bit at all.”
“I’ll worry about that later. Let’s save the colony.”
There was an earth-shattering kaboom.
Watching from the landing dome, Brad felt the tremors even through the artificial gravity keeping his feet to the ground. A spike of fire blasted out through the surface, opening a hole through almost a hundred meters of solid stone as the refitted bombs overpressurized and shattered the surface above what had been supposed to become the Guild hospital.
With the artificial gravity plates in that section vaporized, there was nothing to stop the debris clearing orbital velocity. Thousands—potentially tens of thousands—of tons of rock and other wreckage were flung into the air.
“Konrad, are you tracking this?” Brad asked his channel to Oath of Vengeance. “I’m sure we’ve got a traffic hazard here. Flag the biggest chunks and see if we can do anything about them.”
“On it, Commodore.” His tac officer paused. “That’s one impressive explosion.”
“Vaughn shaped the charges for effect,” the Commodore replied, shaking his head. “If we hadn’t…well, there’d be a lot of funerals going on instead of no funerals.”
From the height the spike of flame had reac
hed before running out of oxygen, Brad had badly underestimated the scale of the bombs, even with the NCO’s warning. Three sectors was probably lowballing the likely damage.
“I’m impressed with your enemies, Commodore,” Daskalov told him, the Command Constable stepping into the surveillance room with a haggard impression. “And with your people’s skill. I apologize for how we met. Outsiders are considered…um…”
“Fresh meat?” Brad suggested. “I know what kind of colony Oberon is, Command Constable. I wasn’t exactly surprised.”
Daskalov shook his head.
“I wouldn’t use those words,” he said primly, “but you’re not wrong. And I apologize for it. We owe you, Commodore Madrid. A lot. Our own scans show that LD-73 maintained overall integrity despite the blast. We’ll do a survey before we let anyone back into the sector, but it looks like the damage was contained.”
“To my hospital site,” Dr. Leonhardt interjected. “I would hope that the Oberon Council of Speakers will see some way to recompense us for that sacrifice. Insurance certainly won’t cover the intentional demolition of the space, regardless of how noble the intent.”
Daskalov winced.
“That, Doctor, is entirely out of my purview,” he admitted. “I intend to suggest to my own superiors at OSE that some form of reward be paid out to Commodore Madrid’s people. You prevented a major disaster here, Commodore. The Vikings will never be outsiders in First Oberon again.”
That was more meaningful than it might have sounded to many, but Brad understood.
“Thank you, Command Constable.”
With a crisp salute that Brad knew he wouldn’t have got from the man before, the OSE officer stepped out, and Brad turned back to Leonhardt.
“What now, Doctor?” he asked. “This is your operation, and we may have blown your original plan to pieces.”
The tall woman grinned at him.
“I and my staff have been going over that with Captain Garibaldi while you were so kindly dealing with the weapons of mass destruction someone tried to short-circuit our plans with,” she said. “The Guild has purchased Captain Garibaldi’s ship and two of the other freighters. We will be operating our hospital temporarily out of this landing site while we have the original space rebuilt. Since we now have a larger space to work with and a blank slate, the possibilities are nearly infinite.”
Dr. Leonhardt, it seemed, was able to find the silver lining in anything.
“We are under contract until the Pythons arrive,” Brad told her. The follow-up mercenary company was still several days out. “Our ground forces will maintain security of wherever you choose to operate, and our space forces will do the same by virtue of, well”—he grinned at the medical administrator—“protecting the moon you happen to be standing on.”
Chapter Nine
At this point, the Vikings were mostly a space fleet that happened to have a landing contingent. The Pythons, however, were an entirely ground force that needed to have ships to carry them around.
The two Fidelis-class heavy corvettes escorting the Pythons’ transport were almost a formality, older ships built on the same base hull as Heart of Vengeance but significantly less upgraded than Brad’s original ship.
The Pythons’ ships slotted into orbit alongside the Vikings’ vessels. They’d probably sort out a permanent placement with the OSE defenders like the Vikings had, but for the moment, their job was to make sure the transport got there safely.
With half of the convoy scattered to the winds of space and the remaining three ships moved together to form an approximation of a single “building,” there was plenty of space for Python’s Voice to settle down in the landing site.
Before the ground had even cooled, armored vehicles designed for just that environment rolled off the transport’s landing ramps. This part of the landing was the only use anyone in the Solar System had for anything resembling a tank at this point, but the turreted and treaded vehicles were capable of surviving the heat of a landing.
They couldn’t maneuver around a colony like Oberon, but that wasn’t their purpose. The intimidating three-point perimeter they formed around Voice’s exit was their purpose. Brad’s people had, at his count, five different ways to eliminate the light tanks—but the Vikings were very well equipped.
Ten minutes after landing, the rest of the company began deploying. The Pythons had almost three times the Vikings’ listed strength, and the kind of long-term ground protection detail the Doctors’ Guild needed was exactly their forte.
Brad and Saburo stepped forward as the Pythons’ commander emerged, trading salutes with the tall Middle Eastern woman.
“Colonel Bathsheba Ahmed,” she greeted them. “It sounds like you’ve had quite the contract, Commodore Madrid.”
“I’ve had quieter,” he agreed with a chuckle. “I’ve had louder, too, though I’d prefer to avoid getting pigeonholed as the Guild’s WMD expert.”
One of the reasons for Brad’s Fleet Reserve commission, after all, had been a legal fig leaf to cover the fact that he’d taken on the Terror with a wave of nuclear warheads. Something that was very, very illegal.
But results earned forgiveness even when you would have been denied permission.
“According to my reading of the contract, you have now completely fulfilled your portion of the terms,” Ahmed told him formally. “I so record and authenticate. The Pythons relieve the Vikings, Commodore Madrid.”
“We stand relieved,” Brad said formally. “In more sense than one,” he continued with a smile. “Though I hope you don’t find any chemical surprises waiting for you.”
“The Pythons, Commodore, have far fewer enemies than you do,” she reminded him. “Though it appears you have friends we don’t as well. There’s someone waiting for you aboard Voice. I was asked not to tell you more.”
From Ahmed’s expression, she hadn’t been told much more…which reduced the number of people it could be to a small handful.
There weren’t that many people who could commandeer their way onto a Guild Mercenary transport for a ride without explaining themselves to the company commander.
What was scariest, Brad realized, was that still left him with multiple possibilities.
One of the Pythons escorted him through their transport, a very different type of ship from most he’d been on. Brad had seen everything from warships to bulk freighters to passenger liners, but a troop transport required different layouts from all of those.
He had enough experience with every other type of spaceship that he was sure he could find his way around eventually, but he was glad for the guide that led him to the guest staterooms and knocked politely on the door.
“Miss? Commodore Madrid here to see you.”
Well, that narrowed the list down enough, and Brad smiled at the tall blonde woman rising from the chair as he stepped into the room.
“Kate Falcone,” he greeted her. “You know, you can reply to my messages with messages instead of just showing up.”
Falcone’s smile was briefer, and she surprised him with a brief hug.
“I could, but the Cadre is still my file and everything is going to shit,” she told him. “Have a seat. I need to brief you.”
“Have you been filled in on the mess here?” Brad asked.
“Yeah. Hence being glad to see you alive,” Falcone replied. She shook her head. “So far as we can tell, the attack on the convoy was primarily an attempt to stop the hospital being built—but the bombs were primarily an attempt to kill you.”
Brad took the offered seat as that thought took his breath away.
“You can’t be serious.”
“The Cadre doesn’t want a major presence of any of the Guilds out here, whatever that ends up costing the locals, and really, really wants you dead,” she said bluntly. “So, you escorting the Doctors’ Guild’s convoy let several factions line up in the same direction with a lot of resources.”
“You’re sure it was the Cadre?” he asked.
/> “Unfortunately, yes,” Falcone confirmed. “The attack on your convoy was the first salvo in a new campaign by the bastards. We’ve seen a dozen attacks over the weeks since, ranging from stealing starships to wrecking the support infrastructure for station-colonies.
“Plus, well…”
She tapped a command and gestured him to a screen.
At the center of the screen was the distinctive bulk of a trio of Fleet cruisers, the preeminent warship type in the Solar System. Fleet battleships existed, but they were guard ships. The cruisers were Fleet’s actual hammer.
This division was standing guard over what looked like a fuel depot, a task group of destroyers and corvettes spread out around it. A small note in the corner of the screen informed him the video was playing at an accelerated time rate.
“This was the Augustus Logistics Facility, Fleet’s fuel depot in Jupiter’s opposing trojan cluster,” she told him. “Augustus was kept relatively quiet, we didn’t like to draw attention to its presence, but it provided us with major refueling facilities on the opposite side of the Solar System from Jupiter.”
Was. Provided. Past tense. Past tense referring to a facility with a cruiser division guarding it.
Brad held his peace and watched the video. He was one of the few people in the system who could instantly recognize the explosions when they happened. Someone had sent nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles into the depot. One of the cruisers ate at least four of the weapons and died with an ignominy Brad didn’t expect Fleet to forget soon.
The depot itself was ripped apart, the major fuel tanks erupting into massive fireballs, the cruisers moving to shield their lesser sisters with their own bulk. They could take the debris hits that the corvettes and destroyers couldn’t…but only at the cost of weakening their own defenses.
Brad wasn’t surprised when the Cadre heat shields collapsed, revealing the destroyer divisions sweeping down on the depot. Four heat shields had concealed twelve destroyers and twenty-four heavy corvettes—where had the Cadre got that many ships?
