by Terry Mixon
That’s when pirates on either side hurled grenades into the middle of his people. The first one went off and dropped half a dozen mercenaries. The second one landed almost at Brad’s feet.
He reached for it, but trooper Orlosky was faster. He snatched it off the deck and put his own body between his comrades and the grenade just as it went off. Blood and bits of armor splashed across Brad’s faceplate.
Not only had he lost another of his troopers, he couldn’t see a thing.
Unable to act, Brad knelt and dug into the pouch at his belt. He knew that there was a rag in there somewhere. It wouldn’t be enough to clean his faceplate, but anything was better than being blind.
While he was struggling with that, someone slammed into him from the side and sent him sprawling. The rag he’d just plucked out of his pouch came loose and he dropped his pistol.
“No laying down the job, sir,” Saburo said over the command channel. “Up you go.”
Someone—Brad assumed it was Saburo—yanked him to his feet. Brad scrubbed his hands furiously across his faceplate. That smeared the blood everywhere but did create a few streaks that he could mostly see through.
His combat team commander was already gone, chasing his men to where they were overrunning one of the barricades.
Brad finally spotted his pistol lying on the deck and took two steps to retrieve it. As he was standing up, he saw that the assault on the second barricade had been less successful. More pirates had reinforced that particular group, and they were now charging toward the Vikings, screaming at the top of their lungs.
Circumstances were far less than optimal, but Brad started shooting pirates and activated his mono-blade. He stepped clear of any of his troops and swung at the first pirate even as he emptied his pistol into the crowd behind the man.
The first pirate proved to be less of a challenge than Brad had feared. While he couldn’t see everything through his faceplate, Brad saw enough to block the man’s strike in such a way that his own blade snapped into his face when he drew back.
The bearded man screamed as the blue filament sliced deeply into his face. He slapped a hand across his injury and staggered back, only to be beheaded by one of the pirates behind him.
It looked to Brad as if the blue-on-blue incident had been accidental, but one never knew with pirates. A fight to the death might be the perfect place to settle a score.
This next man was far superior in skill to the bearded fellow, so Brad changed his opinion over the next several blows. The pirate was too good to have accidentally sliced off his cohort’s head.
The Vikings around Brad held firm and stopped the charging pirates. The fighting was intense for about thirty seconds and then the enemy broke, fleeing the field of battle.
Brad supposed Saburo’s returning forces probably had something to do with that. The Colonel and his men had killed all the people behind the first barricade and been able to turn their full force back to their other enemies.
“After them!” Brad said. “The bridge is in that direction. Keep chasing them and try to catch them with the hatch open.”
If they had to blow the hatch leading onto the bridge—which would certainly be armored—then they were going to wreck the controls and kill everybody in a position to know what in Everdark was really going on.
As his men rushed to keep the pirates too busy to turn and fight, Brad found a dead pirate’s shirt to wipe his faceplate relatively clean. He needed to be able to see what the enemy was doing rather than hopping around half-blinded. He took the time to reload his pistol, holster it, and grab a fallen rifle.
That delay put him near the back of the group heading for the bridge. With the map clear in his mind, he wasn’t surprised when he came around a corner in the corridor and found the entryway to the bridge defended.
Unlike the impromptu defenses, these people were in full armor and carried rifles issued by Fleet to their marines. Whoever had designed the approach to the bridge had made certain that the corridors came in at an angle and gave the defenders a place to hide.
The Vikings had a place to hide too: behind the fleeing pirates that they were chasing.
That defense proved less stout when the pirates at the bridge hatch opened fire directly through their comrades. They’d waited until a thin man not wearing armor reached them.
In seconds, the remaining ambushers were down.
But that still gave the Vikings a chance to bring their own weapons into play. On board a ship, one had to be careful how much force one brought to bear, but that didn’t mean you had no teeth.
Saburo, who was a maestro of unorthodox weaponry, hurled a grenade into the area where the defenders were hiding. Not only did it explode, it scattered intensely luminous particles that stuck to everything.
And as Brad could attest, getting something on one’s faceplate really ruined one’s ability to aim.
The grenade also had an audio component, but with the men ahead of them in sealed armor, that wasn’t nearly as debilitating as it would’ve been under other circumstances.
With the aid of that distraction, Saburo’s troops pushed forward and exchanged heavy fire with the defenders. Singly and in pairs, his mercenaries started dropping. Four, five, seven were down.
The losses were not one-sided. The enemy was dropping at an even faster rate. That made the unarmored man, who was now glowing brightly, tap a code into the hatch leading onto the bridge. It opened.
Knowing that time was exceptionally short, Brad hurled himself forward. One of the dying pirates fired his rifle at Brad. The slug struck him a glancing blow to the leg. Based on the stab of pain, something had gotten through, but he wasn’t sure how bad it was.
Someone behind Brad shot the defender just as Brad knocked the man over with his shoulder and rolled onto the bridge of the carrier.
It was larger than the bridge on the cruiser Freedom, though it was laid out in a similar pattern. There were more stations and that meant more people. Brad saw he was dealing with almost a dozen people. All of them were rising from their seats and grabbing for pistols.
“Everyone freeze,” Brad shouted through his exterior speaker. “Anyone that surrenders now gets to live.”
Though he doubted that would work, Brad hoped to gain enough time for his men to follow him in. His hand slapped on the control to the hatch, aborting the command to close it.
As quick as a snake, the man who had been seated at the command chair raised the pistol in his hand and shot the pirate who had retreated onto the bridge in the side of the head.
That gory betrayal froze everyone for a few seconds. Just long enough for Saburo and some of his men to get through the bridge hatch behind Brad.
The pale, red-headed man who had just murdered his associate dropped his pistol and raised his hands. “I surrender. We all surrender.”
Brad wasn’t certain that everyone else agreed with that statement, and for another few seconds, it looked as if there was going to be a firefight. Then, one by one, the pirates dropped their weapons and raised their hands above their heads.
Chapter Twenty-Six
“Step away from the consoles,” Saburo barked. “Anyone twitches wrong, we open fire.”
Longbow’s bridge crew slowly obeyed, but the man in command slowly rotated to face the boarders, holding his empty hands out.
“Commodore Madrid, I presume?” he asked in a calm Martian accent. “Look at the display.”
He pointed. Brad followed his gesture and saw, for the first time since he’d abandoned the tanker, the tactical plot. The Cadre destroyer was gone, like he’d hoped, but the enemy corvettes had proven more dangerous than he’d expected. No one had predicted they’d be the brand-new Invictus-class ships, and they’d focused their fire on their opposite numbers in the Vikings. Alan-a-dale was leaking atmosphere, and Heart of Vengeance had clearly taken hard hits.
And a swarm of green icons were charging toward his people, a minute at most from contact.
“The
drones are in terminal acquisition,” the Cadre officer told him. “With the signal from Longbow cut off, they will go into full autonomous mode. Your ships? They can’t win that fight.
“Saburo, shut them down,” Brad snapped.
“That won’t save you,” the redheaded man noted. “The corvettes’ commander is Lionel Madrigal. He’s a fanatic and he has nukes. If the drones shut down completely, he’ll know what happened and he’ll burn his ships up to nuke your destroyers.
“How many friends are you prepared to lose today, Commodore? I can save them all…if you’ll let me.”
He gestured to a cluster of control consoles to one side of the bridge. Their screens looked almost like the officers had been playing one of Michelle’s strategy games, not commanding a warship—which meant they were the control systems for the Javelin drones.
“You expect me to trust you?” Brad snapped.
“You can read the display as well as I can,” the stranger replied. “Thirty seconds, tops. Your call, Madrid.”
It was possible the man was lying. It was possible that the drones weren’t in autonomous mode yet, and if Brad let the officer access the drone control systems, he’d turn them on Brad’s people.
But he was right. The two corvettes had survived everything Brad’s fleet could throw at them for far too long, and if they did have nukes, they’d be able to at least take out his destroyers.
The destroyers that happened to have Brad’s wife aboard.
“Do it,” he snapped, before he could change his mind. “But if you betray me…”
The man shrugged and crossed to the consoles, seemingly unaware of the guns pointed at him. He tapped a series of commands, and a warning sign popped up on the screen.
“Activate Prodigal Protocols,” he said aloud to the screen. “Authentication Michaels-Lambda-Niner-Fuck-This-Garbage.”
For a moment, nothing happened—and then the colors on the screen swapped. The two Cadre destroyers were suddenly bright crimson, and the Vikings’ ships were the solid blue of allied units.
The drones’ profile didn’t change, and for several eternal seconds, Brad was convinced the Cadre officer had just put on a light show to fool them.
And then fifteen drones launched on each Cadre corvette at point-blank range. The torpedoes didn’t have much velocity after only a few seconds of acceleration, but the Cadre appeared to have access to the high-density chemical warheads Fleet used for overkill.
The hundred-kilo warheads were equivalent to five hundred tons of old-style TNT. Each.
Each corvette took the equivalent of a small nuclear bomb, vanishing before they even realized they’d been betrayed.
The Cadre officer tapped a few more commands and stepped away from the console.
“It might be valuable, Commodore, if you order your people to leave the drones be,” he said calmly. “They’re on their way back to Longbow in autonomous mode, weapons locked down.”
“Who are you?” Brad demanded.
“Commander Connor Michaels, Independence Militia.”
“Bullshit,” the Commodore snapped. “This is a Cadre ship and you’re Cadre.”
Michaels sighed.
“As you mean the term, yes,” he agreed. “Right now, Commodore, the Phoenix has no reason to think anyone in this convoy survived. That gives us a margin of opportunity.”
“‘Us,’ Commander?” Brad asked, only half-willingly.
“I’m assuming you have an Agency operative with you? I need someone with authority, Commodore Madrid. I’m willing to cut a deal…but the moment the Phoenix realizes I’m alive, you won’t be able to meet my price.”
The redheaded man smiled sadly.
“Shall we talk in private?”
It would take several hours to rendezvous the various ships, and something in Michaels’ demeanor led Brad to think they didn’t have that much time. Fortunately, the SAR shuttle that had picked up Falcone and the other Dutchmen was headed to the carrier already, and it only took another ten minutes to be sure the whole ship was secure and get her aboard.
Longbow wasn’t in great shape after being boarded…but she was more intact than he’d hoped. There was a lot of the normal combat damage, but they’d taken life support, Engineering, and the bridge intact. She looked like crap inside, but she could fly and she could fight.
Of course, all of her systems were locked behind encryption several light-years beyond Brad’s own ability. That, of course, was why he had Corporal Reece.
Falcone entered the bridge less than five minutes after they’d secured the ship, her helmet off but ready in her hands in case someone did anything stupid.
“What have we got?” she asked.
“Senior officer wants to cut a deal,” he summarized. “We disconnected the systems to the Captain’s office and shoved him in there. The rest of the prisoners are locked up elsewhere, just in case.”
“We took more of those on the bridge than anywhere else,” Saburo told them both grimly. “And most of what we’ve got are juniors. I don’t think we have a single officer alive who wasn’t on the bridge, and not many of the noncoms.”
“This ship had a crew of three hundred in Fleet service,” Brad noted. “How bad is it?”
“We have fifty-two prisoners,” his ground commander told him. “Half are wounded. We’ve got eighteen dead and fifteen wounded of our own, but this boat at least has a Fleet-standard medbay. All of the wounded should live—ours and theirs.”
“We’re not even into communications yet,” Brad told Falcone. “Reece is on her way up and that’s going to be her first port of call, but I figure we want to talk to the officer together.”
“Agreed. Usual terms, I think,” she said harshly.
Which meant a promise of life…with the unspoken small print of it being life in the Mercury mines. It wasn’t a nice deal.
“It’s your game,” he told her. “Your rules.”
He wasn’t going to shed a lot of tears for pirates, even if he wasn’t quite up to tossing them out the airlock himself.
“I want to check one thing first,” she said, stepping over to the command chair. She rotated the seat to a specific angle and clicked something. “Original builder’s plates,” she said as she slid the chair forward.
“Fuck me.”
“Kate?”
“Take a look,” she told him.
Brad stepped over to study the plate she’d uncovered. It gave a date—about six months earlier. There should have been a yard name, but that was missing.
What wasn’t missing were the hull number and commissioned name.
DC-010 Longbow.
“I thought Fleet only built eight of these,” Brad said slowly.
“So far as I know, that’s exactly right,” Falcone replied. “Let’s talk to this Michaels. I have all kinds of questions for him now.”
Michaels, it seemed, was quite familiar with the Captain’s office he’d been put in. In the ten minutes it took Brad and Falcone to join him in the office, he’d turned the desk around, set two chairs “behind” it for them, grabbed a seat for himself, and made coffee.
“Can we trust the coffee?” Falcone asked as she eyed the cups.
“There’s nothing in it,” Michaels replied. “It’s Fleet-grade, so black as tar and bitter as betrayal, but Joyce had cream, sugar, and booze around if you want them.”
“Bitter as betrayal seems appropriate,” the Agent told him. “You want a deal?”
“Yeah. And we’re not doing it on your terms, before you tell me you’ll spare our lives and send us to the Mercury mines.”
Brad swallowed a choking laugh. Apparently, Falcone had a reputation now.
She leaned across the desk.
“And why do you think that’s what I’d offer? Or that you’re worth better?” she asked, the sweetness in her tone dangerously deceptive.
“We’ve met, Agent, though I doubt you remember me,” Michaels told her. “I was one of the five pilots on Spearthrower whe
n you took us after those wreckers on Venus. I remember the deal you gave their leader, and I owe my people better than that.”
“I haven’t met many pirates who think that much of their crews,” Brad replied.
“I can explain the difference, Commodore, but that falls under the things I have of value to trade,” the Cadre officer replied. “And we’re running short on time if you’re going to meet my price.”
“And why would that be?” Brad asked.
“Because once the Cadre kills my family, I have nothing to even try to live for,” he said flatly. “So, let’s talk terms, shall we?”
That was a verbal punch in the gut Brad hadn’t expected. He thought he’d concealed his reaction, but from Michaels’s eyes, Brad had failed.
“Talk,” Falcone ordered.
“I can tell you where this ship came from. Where her crew was recruited. I can unlock her systems and give you control of her,” Michaels laid out. “I’ll tell you everything I know.”
“And in exchange?” the Agent asked.
“Three things.” He held up a finger.
“One, I want full amnesty for the crew. I doubt any of the serious cases survived, but I’ll review the list and let you know if there’s anyone left aboard you can’t risk setting free. The rest I want you to deliver safely to Earth with new identities and clean records.”
He held up a second finger.
“Two, I want to live. I’m pretty inarguably guilty of treason, regardless of the ameliorating circumstances, but I want a promise of life for myself and any other surviving officers and noncoms. I’ll accept we need to go to prison, but we don’t go to a death facility like the Mercury mines.”
He held up a third finger.
“Third, and if you fail at this, it’s a deal-breaker, I have a wife and two little girls on Mars. All of the middle and junior officers aboard Longbow have families. Didn’t think of that when we were being fed the line of bullshit, and when the brick finally dropped, the Phoenix happily told us they were being watched.”
