Bound By Law (Vigilante Book 3)

by Terry Mixon

  “All set, sir. We’re ready to launch on your command.”

  “Detach all combat craft in twenty seconds on my mark. Mark. Good luck and try to take some prisoners alive.”

  “You sure know how to take all the fun out of things, Commodore. We’ll do you proud. Saburo out.”

  Heart of Vengeance carried a single assault shuttle, though it no longer carried troops unless they really needed them, while Oath of Vengeance had three. Oath’s small craft would be able to deliver quite the knockout punch for such a small facility, no matter how many people were inside.

  Brad sat in his command chair watching the small craft inch forward on the main display. They were emitting no signals, so his tactical officer was manually putting in his best estimation for their positions.

  Even though it was probably safe for Saburo to send signals back to the two warships, Brad had ordered radio silence. All it would take was one small mistake to let the enemy know they were coming.

  Konrad Bogdanov updated the display every few minutes until the shuttles were almost on top of the asteroid. Then the man turned toward his commander.

  “Sixty seconds out, Commodore. Still no sign that their approach has been detected.”

  “Should I start accelerating as soon as the attack begins?” Michelle asked. “We can be there in less than five minutes.”

  Brad considered that but shook his head. “If Saburo does his job right, they may not know he’s boarded for a little bit. Let’s give him a chance to secure as much of the facility as possible. Once he notifies us that he’s in hostile contact with the enemy, we’ll start accelerating.

  “If it turns out that the asteroid is empty, then it won’t make a difference. If it’s full of hostile pirates, let’s give Saburo the best chance possible to get full surprise.”

  He turned his attention to the tactical officer. “I want you to be ultra-attentive once the attack begins. It’s possible the Cadre has external weapons platforms. If they fire, I want you to take them out as quickly as possible.”

  Both of his officers signaled their understanding.

  Saburo and his men stopped the shuttles near the surface of the asteroid and made their assault in armored vac-suits. The original plans indicated that there were three separate airlocks: one for cargo, two for personnel. So, all the Colonel needed to do was send an assault shuttle to each.

  “Incoming signal from Colonel Saburo,” Xan Wong said from the communications console. “They’re initiating the attack. The airlocks are still powered, so they’re bypassing security and they’ll head in at the same time.”

  That was the first clue that something was not as it should be. There was no reason for Fleet to have left that facility powered.

  The next sixty seconds passed with syrupy slowness.

  “All three teams are going in,” Wong said.

  This was it. If the facility was filled with Cadre pirates, all hell was about to break loose.

  Brad waited tensely for the first update. He didn’t have to wait long.

  “We’ve got hostiles in here,” Saburo said after just fifteen seconds. “We really stirred them up, too. We expected no more than a few dozen people, but I think we’re dealing with at least twice that.

  “No heavy weapons, but these people have some training. Marine-level at least. I think we’re dealing with some of those Cadre commandos.”

  Perfect. Though Brad supposed this wasn’t entirely unexpected. If this was as critical a facility as they’d thought, the bastards would protect it as well as they could.

  “Take them out as quickly as you can,” Brad ordered. “We don’t want them to destroy any of the critical computer files if we can avoid it. These people are our lead to the Cadre base.”

  “Copy that, Commodore. Saburo out.”

  Brad turned his attention to his crew aboard Oath. “All ahead full. Scanners at maximum. They know we’re here now, so let’s see if they have any guardians for us to deal with.”

  “Scanners at maximum,” Konrad confirmed. “Nothing in the immediate area around the asteroid. Not unless they’re exceptionally stealthy.”

  “Don’t discount that,” Brad warned his tactical officer. “We’ve seen that the Cadre has access to some formerly Fleet vessels. That means that it’s possible they have the same kind of stealth technology we’re using. From this point forward, we need to treat operations against the Cadre as if we were attacking Fleet vessels.”

  From the look she gave him, Michelle wasn’t convinced that that was the case, but she didn’t argue.

  Frankly, he wasn’t convinced that they had that many Fleet vessels. But the fact that they had any at all was deeply disturbing. He didn’t believe for a second that Fleet had misplaced one of their secret carriers. There was something far deeper going on than he’d ever imagined possible.

  “We’re three minutes away from the asteroid,” Michelle said. “How close do you want us?”

  “Within easy gatling range. If we have to withdraw and fire on the place, I’d rather leave something intact for us to salvage later.”

  “Contact!” Konrad said moments later. “Correction, two contacts. They’re outside gatling range but inside extreme torpedo range. I’ll need a minute to work up an estimate of their size, but based on their acceleration, they’re probably corvettes.”

  Brad did some mental calculations in his head. If he went with the worst-case scenario, those were heavy corvettes or light destroyers and they might be as powerful as Heart of Vengeance. If it were just those two ships against his corvette and destroyer, this could get hairy but the outcome was probably going to be in his favor.

  Unfortunately, his recent dealings with the Cadre had left Brad convinced that he couldn’t assume anything. These two ships might be the only guardians this facility had, but then again, they might not.

  If these ships entangled both his ships, others in the area could get Oath and Heart into their crosshairs. The best course of action for him would be to assume that was exactly what the Cadre wanted to happen.

  As they say, hope for the best and plan for the worst.

  “Keep the scanners going at maximum power, Konrad,” he ordered his tactical officer. “It’s always possible there are more ships waiting to get the drop on us. How quickly can we take these ships out?”

  The tactical officer turned in his seat to face his commander. “If they want to stop us from capturing this asteroid, they can’t just sit out there firing at us. They’re going to have to come into our range. We could use the asteroid as cover and blast them with torpedoes as they close.”

  “We could,” Michelle said, “but that would leave us pinned against this asteroid if other ships open fire from hiding. We’d have no room to maneuver and no speed. I think we’d be better off going out to meet them.”

  Konrad shook his head. “Then we wouldn’t be in range to cover Colonel Saburo. No matter how we slice this, we’re going to have to divide our attention. I’d rather stay close to our people and make sure that somebody doesn’t pop out of nowhere and blow the entire asteroid to pieces.”

  “Throw the tactical representation onto the main screen,” Brad ordered.

  Once the man had done so, Brad considered the distances involved between the two enemy ships, the asteroid, and his ships. This would’ve been a really useful time to have all of his vessels there.

  As things sat, he couldn’t cover everyone well enough to be certain of the outcome. He was going to have to take some kind of chance one way or the other.

  “Have Heart take position near the asteroid and provide cover for Colonel Saburo,” he finally ordered. “They can add their fire to ours as we close with these other ships. That’s going to make their fire less accurate, but it makes certain that these two ships aren’t going to harm our people on the asteroid.”

  Two heavy corvettes—if that’s what they were—against a destroyer like Oath of Vengeance would be a little bit too close to an even fight for Brad’s taste.
If they weren’t as powerful as Heart, Brad would be able to press his advantage and really hurt them.

  Well, he wasn’t going to settle this by dithering. He gestured to both of his officers to execute his plan and sat back in his command chair to see what the results wound up being.

  A minute later, Konrad smiled at him. “I think those are both light corvettes. They’ve got good acceleration for their size and their emissions aren’t as well shielded as they could be. The second one is somewhat obscured behind the first, so it’s possible that it’s a heavy. We’ll know as soon as they open fire.”

  With that, almost as if they were listening in, the two ships in front of Oath opened fire. The lead vessel fired two torpedoes, while the one behind it fired four.

  So, one heavy and one light. They weren’t going to be pleased that Oath of Vengeance could fire two more torpedoes than they could. This fight would be interesting, but it should be relatively secure in the outcome.

  Konrad straightened abruptly. “New contact! There’s a vessel coming out of stealth to our rear. It’s not inside torpedo range yet, but it’s damned close. They have us bracketed!”

  That’s what he got for thinking this would be easy.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Brad opened a communications channel to Heart of Vengeance. Jason Finley’s face appeared on the small repeater screen by Brad’s knee.

  “I see them,” Jason said before Brad could speak. “I’m heading out to engage them now. We just have to hope that there isn’t another one hiding out there in the darkness, just waiting for me to uncover the asteroid.”

  “Try to finish them as fast as you can,” Brad said. “I don’t want to leave Saburo hanging in the wind.”

  “Copy that. Heart out.”

  Brad focused his attention forward. “Fire all torpedoes, Konrad. Use the gatlings to take theirs out.”

  In some ways, a straight-up space battle didn’t have a lot of mystery. Once the pieces were on the table, everything depended on the skills of the tactical officers and commanders. And, of course, what kind of weaponry those ships carried. Just based on the law of averages, Oath of Vengeance was going to win this fight.

  That didn’t mean that she’d come out unharmed. Without finesse, a space battle was like two men in a boxing ring, standing toe-to-toe and hitting one another in the face over and over. Somebody was going to win, but everyone was going to bleed.

  A nimble fighter, though, could dance around his opponent while still punching his lights out, dodging every blow that came his way. That was how he saw the Vikings. Not only the finest crew possible, but engines and other equipment that had been enhanced to give them performance beyond what any average ship could manage.

  In Oath’s case, that included her targeting systems. A lot of tactical officers would be forced to use their gatlings as water hoses, spraying everywhere and hoping that the other guy got wet.

  Not Konrad Bogdanov and Oath. The destroyer had the very best scanners the Vikings could get outside of Fleet. Or possibly even inside Fleet.

  Brad had tapped Kate Falcone for sources as they’d been upgrading their ships over the last two years. She’d come through in spades, in both quantity and quality. It wouldn’t surprise him if she’d diverted Fleet equipment his way.

  That wasn’t even technically illegal anymore, as his people were reserve Fleet officers and the ships were counted as reserve units. The whole deal, after all, had been to provide a legal fig leaf for Brad’s having used nukes. Anything less than that was fair game.

  Konrad deftly guided Oath’s gatling fire to the enemy torpedoes. He stopped four of the enemy torpedoes before they even got close. He stopped one more just short of Oath, but the last one got through.

  That’s where Michelle showed her skill. A destroyer was a fairly large ship compared to a torpedo, but she made it dance around at the very last moment. His wife had come a long way since commanding a SaturCorp drop ship. Her deft touches on the controls made the destroyer swerve to the side at the last moment, almost as if it were skating on ice.

  The enemy torpedo had been about to punch into the destroyer’s aft quarter but found itself facing empty space. Not much empty space, but more than enough for the reactive armor to stop the fragments coming toward the ship when the torpedo exploded.

  No doubt Mike Randall would complain about overstressing the engines, but Brad knew he’d rather do work tuning his beloved engines than patching holes in the hull.

  With the enemy zero for six, Brad focused his attention on their own initial salvo. The enemy fired at them again right before Oath’s torpedoes entered terminal range. Konrad had already fired again, since Oath’s rate of fire with torpedoes seemed to be somewhat faster than the enemy’s.

  The Cadre’s antimissile defense wasn’t up to the same standards as the Vikings’. Of the eight incoming torpedoes, they only managed to stop four.

  Konrad had targeted the heavier enemy vessel with five torpedoes, shunting the other three toward the lighter unit. In one of the flukes of space combat, the lighter unit stopped all three of the torpedoes coming its way.

  That meant that the heavier ship took four torpedoes. Her reactive armor did the best it could, but nothing was that good. Explosions rippled along the heavy corvette’s hull for a few seconds and then the ship exploded.

  The two enemy vessels had positioned themselves close together to provide covering fire for one another. The survivor saw the folly of that particular strategy as she took the direct brunt of her comrade’s explosion on their own hull.

  “Enemy heavy corvette destroyed,” Conrad said needlessly. “The lead ship seems to have lost some engine power, so I believe they’ve taken damage to Engineering. Eight torpedoes outbound to the enemy.”

  Brad wished he’d risked cramming Law’s combat teams aboard. They’d put every man and woman from Oath’s combat teams onto the asteroid, which left nothing to try and board the enemy ship. He’d just have to let this play out and see if they could recover anything from the wreckage when the fight was over.

  A glance at the tactical repeater showed Heart was having a little bit rougher of a time. The ship behind them was a heavy corvette of the same weight class, and they were throwing identical numbers of torpedoes at one another.

  “Bring us about,” Brad ordered Michelle. “I want us back to cover Heart as quickly as possible.

  “Konrad, keep using the gatlings on that second salvo and make sure that our torpedoes finish this guy off.”

  Brad knew that he was taking a chance that the enemy ship he’d targeted would get away or be able to fire at the asteroid, but it was a small one. The chances that the light corvette could stop eight torpedoes was vanishingly small.

  Though, he had to admit that they’d showed far more skill thus far than he’d anticipated. Best not to be so confident. He’d keep a very close eye on the ship to see what happened when the second salvo hit it.

  “Keep us close enough to help cover the asteroid,” Brad ordered. “We’ll have to split our attention until the guy behind us is gone.”

  This was pretty much the worst-case scenario that Brad could have anticipated. The enemy had spread the Vikings’ attention all around the asteroid. There were several different ways the enemy might pull a surprise and kill a bunch of his people.

  Heart of Vengeance and the other corvette were exchanging torpedoes in waves. The other vessel certainly seemed to be competently run. Whoever was using their gatlings for defense was good.

  Honestly, they were too good. Better than Erasmo Poulos, Heart’s tactical officer. So far, the enemy had managed to stop every single torpedo Heart had fired at him and he was continuing to close with the other ship even though Oath of Vengeance had turned toward their duel.

  That was either suicidal stupidity or they knew something Brad didn’t.

  Brad felt his eyes narrowing. Had the Vikings really managed to slip up on the asteroid, or was this some kind of convoluted trap? A simpler explanati
on might be that they thought they could get the drop on Brad’s ships, but that didn’t explain why the enemy was pressing the attack when the battle was turning sharply against them.

  “We hit the light corvette on our side,” Konrad said. “Two hits. I can’t believe the bastard managed to stop six of the other torpedoes. Their ship has stopped maneuvering, but they fired a third salvo before we got them.”

  The tactical officer grunted. “They targeted the asteroid. We still have two of their torpedoes coming at us, too.”

  Crap. Now Brad had to choose between rushing to the defense of his other ship or making absolutely certain none of the enemy torpedoes managed to get to the asteroid.

  Under normal circumstances, he might be tempted to just let the torpedoes get through to the asteroid. There were only two, rock could absorb a lot of damage, and his people were in armored suits.

  These circumstances were far from normal, however. If the Cadre thought it was worthwhile to fire at the asteroid, they had a reasonable expectation that their shots might be able to eliminate it. There was something down there that they definitely didn’t want anyone else getting their hands on.

  Konrad sat up a bit straighter. “The ship fighting Heart just fired a salvo at the asteroid too. Poulos missed them. We’ve got four inbound on the asteroid from almost diametrically opposed angles.”

  And Brad couldn’t allow a single one of them through or Saburo and his men might all die. No pressure.

  “Increase our acceleration,” Brad snapped. “Michelle, get us as close to the asteroid as possible and put us in a position where we can bring our gatlings to bear on all four torpedoes. Focus on the ones closest to us right now, Konrad.”

  Oath of Vengeance leapt forward as Michelle applied full thrust. There was no way they were going to get back to the asteroid before the most distant torpedoes struck it, but they could improve the odds of Konrad taking them out first as much as possible.