by Terry Mixon
He shivered.
“They’re, what, the second-largest spaceship manufacturer inside the Belt?” he asked.
“One of only three in the star system with the yards to build cruisers,” Michelle confirmed. “Hell, TMF basically mass-produces the gas divers for Saturn and Jupiter. They run multiple facilities and basically own Earth-Sol Lagrange Three.”
“Well, that does answer one of our questions,” Brad agreed. “Well done, Xan. Well done indeed.
“Now all we need is to capture some of these ships so we have some physical evidence to give the Agency. A corp that big, that rich? Falcone is going to need every scrap of ammo we can give her to bring them down.”
He smiled.
“Fortunately, the Everlit has delivered us the opportunity to do just that.”
They drifted closer, distances shrinking as the two flotillas approached each other and Oath of Vengeance continued to move stealthily behind the convoy. More details emerged on their targets as they got closer, confirming their long-range assessment as correct.
Three of the most modern destroyers and two of the most modern cruisers built in the star system, plus a fourth destroyer that was a specialized ship-killer. With the cruisers, the convoy alone outgunned any of the Jovian flotillas.
“That’s strange,” Bogdanov said slowly as he studied the data on the destroyers.
“Those are dangerous words right now, Commander,” Brad pointed out. “What’s strange?”
“The destroyers are colder than they should be,” the tactical officer said. “Fusion plants are on minimum; life support has to be shut down.”
“They’re rigged for tow,” Michelle replied. “That would be the status we’d expect.”
“Yeah…but they’re too cold.”
A chill ran down Brad’s spine as he pulled the data to the repeater screens.
“It takes time for a ship to cool down,” Bogdanov continued. “Even with heat sinks and radiators running, ships only cool so quickly. Those weren’t shut down in the last few hours as they rigged for tow.”
“They’ve been shut down for at least twelve hours,” Brad concluded aloud. “And uninhabitable for at least six. Where did the crews go?”
He was already running the numbers.
A cruiser could run with a passage crew of about fifty, ten percent of its full complement. A destroyer needed a larger percentage, fifteen to twenty crew versus a regular crew of sixty to eighty.
Four destroyers’ passage crew was probably eighty people. Maybe a hundred.
“What about the cruisers?” he snapped. An extra hundred people would take one of the cruisers from “passage crew” to “skeleton crew”—and the distinction between those two was that a skeleton crew could fight the ship.
“They’re both live…no, fuck.”
“They’re too hot,” Brad agreed. “They’re not just live; they’re at battle stations.” He spun in his seat.
“Xan! Emergency transmission to the flotilla—it’s a trap.”
It was too late. With the time delay, the TMF crews had acted as he was speaking.
The closer Tremendous-class cruiser rolled to present an entire broadside of her turrets. Four of her eight immense weapons platforms, each a match for Bound by Law’s dorsal or ventral turrets, trained on Brad’s people with deadly precision—and fired.
Even the fifteen-centimeter guns only fired their projectiles so quickly. The three mercenary ships and their stolen carrier had enough time to begin to maneuver—but their base velocities were already low.
Massive slugs, each with the power of a kiloton-range nuclear warhead, hammered home on Brad’s ships. Reactive armor lit up, explosions driving the slugs away…but Brad’s corvettes had already lost much of their armor.
They’d expected more warning, and Brad watched in silent horror as Alan-a-dale and Heart of Vengeance ceased to exist in glittering balls of fire and debris.
Chapter Thirty-Three
“Broadband transmission from Captain Noah,” Xan said quietly into the silence. She didn’t even ask before playing it.
“I’m insulted, Michaels,” Noah said flatly. “Even if your bosses hadn’t told us Longbow had been destroyed, even a blind man can tell an Invictus from a Bard or a Fidelis at twenty thousand kilometers.
“Everyone will be happier if we reclaim Longbow, though, so I give you this one chance to surrender.”
The transmission cut off.
“Longbow is firing!” Bogdanov snapped. “I have torpedoes and gatling rounds in space. She’s taken hits, but she’s still in the fight.”
“Andre?” Brad asked.
“Bound by Law is maneuvering and…Everdark!”
Captain Noah wasn’t going to be sending any more surrender demands. Whether his flagship was Belisarius or Cataphract was irrelevant, as Brenda Andre’s ship fired both of her turrets into the ship.
The Lancers were well defended against torpedoes, but nothing could stop a fifteen-centimeter mass driver. The same crushing force that had battered the Vikings hammered into Noah’s flagship—and Andre wasn’t planning to ask for surrenders. Three full salvos of heavy rounds struck home, accompanied by a spray of smaller projectiles from Law’s secondary guns.
The secondary guns were wasted ammunition. The Lancer’s reactive armor was an older, less capable model. Bound by Law had survived direct hits from two of the cruiser’s guns, barely. Captain Noah’s ship simply disintegrated—and Andre turned her fire to the other escort destroyer.
Meanwhile, Longbow’s torpedoes and drones flashed toward the cruisers. Both of the Tremendouses were moving now, and a chill ran down Brad’s spine.
The convoy had only had enough crew to man one of those ships. Everdark, they only had enough crew to man half of the turrets on one of the ships…but they clearly also had the torpedoes running, at least in automatic mode for one shot as thirty-six weapons blasted free.
“Where’s the transport?” Brad asked quietly.
“What do you mean?” Bogdanov demanded. “We have to interv—”
“Either Michaels can disable two half-manned cruisers with Longbow…or Oath’s intervention won’t change anything,” Brad said harshly, hating his own words. “We need to complete the Everlit mission.”
His tac officer swallowed and checked his data.
“The transport is burning hard for the Inner System,” he reported. “She’s well out of everyone’s range that she knows of, with the cruisers between her and our people.”
“But not out of our range,” Brad noted.
“No, sir.”
“Saburo, prepare to launch the assault shuttles,” Brad ordered. “Michelle, I want us to go after the transport for long enough to match velocities for the shuttle launch. Bogdanov—that transport is armed. Cripple the gatlings before we launch the shuttles.
“Then—and only then—can we go after the cruisers.”
And pray that he still had friends left by then.
For a few seconds, it looked like the cruiser crews had made a mistake. Longbow’s handful of torpedoes traveled most of the distance to their target unopposed, and none of the Tremendouses’ secondary guns were firing at all.
Then the torpedoes flashed into terminal mode at a thousand kilometers…and disappeared as a net of laser fire swept out from their target.
“Wait, they have lasers?” Michelle asked. “I thought the focusing issues meant no one was using them as long-range weapons.”
“They’re not,” Brad said, studying the data. “They can get a useful focus at a thousand klicks, so they’re using it as an anti-torpedo system. Longbow isn’t going to get birds through.”
“Well, they might if Michaels does that,” Bogdanov noted, gesturing to the screen where the drones were adjusting course. Instead of sending fifteen of them at each ship, they were now all charging the ship that had killed Brad’s corvettes.
And they launched as one, thirty torpedoes unleashing into space even as their mass drivers
started to target the torpedoes swarming toward Longbow.
It still wasn’t an even fight, though the lack of secondary guns and follow-up torpedo salvos from the cruiser was helping level the playing field.
“Heat sinks or not, everyone is going to pick us up in about sixty seconds,” Michelle announced. “Are we ready to disable the transport?”
“Standing by for your call,” Bogdanov confirmed, tearing his attention away from the battle occurring behind them. “I should be able to do it in sixty seconds…but the closer we can get, the better.”
“And the longer we wait to intervene in the main fight, the less likely we are to have friends left,” Brad snapped. “As soon as we drop stealth, disable the transport and launch Saburo’s shuttles.”
The second Lancer blew apart as he looked back to the main battle, but it didn’t go alone. The destroyer had cut through the Javelin drones from Longbow, wiping out over a third of the robotic ships.
It came too close to Bound by Law in doing so, and Captain Andre exacted a terminal price from the destroyer. The numbers were now even, but a carrier and a destroyer versus two cruisers wasn’t a fair fight at all.
“Dropping stealth…now!” Michelle barked as she twisted Oath into a parallel course with the TMF transport. They were only aligned for a few seconds, but it was enough.
Oath’s gatling mass drivers fired carefully, neatly targeted bursts that walked their way along the length of the fleeing transports. The ship’s engines flickered and died as Bogdanov’s fire shattered their thruster nozzles, and the transport’s six defensive mass drivers didn’t even start warming up before they died.
“Go! Go! Go!” Michelle chanted as Oath’s three assault shuttles broke free. Five seconds passed. Ten. Fifteen.
And then the parasite craft were far enough away to clear the safety radius, and Oath of Vengeance flipped in space and brought her drives up to maximum.
Brad’s ship had been born for battle with the Cadre—and that battle was waiting.
That battle wasn’t going well. Bound by Law was exchanging fire with the second cruiser, and even though the destroyer’s continued survival was a sign of how undermanned the other ship was, it wasn’t a battle she was winning.
Longbow’s drones were spent, their torpedoes dying as helplessly against the cruiser’s automated defenses as their motherships, and as Oath turned back toward the battle, Brad watched as the drones flung themselves suicidally into the stolen warship.
The lasers tried, but the drones were big enough that they made it through—and Michaels had clearly aimed his suicidal robotic friends carefully. Half of the cruiser’s engines and three of the four turrets currently facing Longbow shattered under the impacts, clearing a path for…what?
“What is he doing?” Bogdanov asked. “I have multiple parasites breaking clear of Longbow. Shuttles? Life pods?”
Brad’s own systems projected Longbow’s new course as the ex-Cadre ship brought her engines back up to full, giving the same answer Bogdanov had just reached. Longbow was on a ramming course—and the engine damage meant there was no way the Tremendous could avoid her.
From the spray of mass-driver fire, torpedoes, and laser fire, however, her crew was hoping they could kill her.
“Incoming from Longbow,” Xan reported. Michaels’s face appeared on Brad’s screen, and the ex-Cadre officer looked…drained.
Smoke filled the bridge, but Brad could still see that the redheaded man was alone.
“Life support is fucked,” he said calmly. “Weapons are fucked. Armor is fucked. I’ve got engines and navigation, and you guys can’t kill two cruisers, however shittily manned.”
Michaels shook his head and coughed against the smoke, a timer over his shoulder counting down seconds.
“Tell Falcone I’m sorry,” he continued. “I never did warn her that I had the ability to drop the bridge crew into escape pods from my command seat. She’ll live.” He paused, coughing again.
Brad wasn’t sure if the tears on his face were from the smoke or from what the man had decided to do.
“Tell my wife…tell her I’m so—”
The transmission cut out.
“Direct hit on Longbow’s com center,” Bogdanov reported quietly. “Probably took out the bridge, too.” The tac officer shook his head.
“He’s gone, sir.”
“No, he’s not,” Brad murmured. “Not really…not until…”
Longbow slammed into the stolen cruiser. Even if they had killed Michaels, it hadn’t been soon enough to save them—and moments after the impact, the nuclear warheads he’d warned Brad rested in the carrier’s magazines detonated.
“Bogdanov, full dazzler salvo on the other cruiser,” Brad snapped. “Clear the path for Andre’s guns!”
One cruiser against two destroyers was still a winning combination for the Cadre, but the cruiser was badly undermanned. The chaff torpedoes were easily handled by a fully functional cruiser…but the Tremendous they were fighting wasn’t fully functional.
The dazzlers detonated, throwing the entire defensive fire out of alignment as Oath dove into her own gatling range and Bound by Law targeted the cruiser’s turrets with her own mass drivers.
“She’s ceased fire,” Michelle reported softly. “Most of her turrets are gone. Brad…what do we do?”
“Transmit a surrender order,” he told them. “Get Andre on the line. We’ll need Major Doary’s people to take—”
The cruiser detonated. They hadn’t hit her that hard. Brad closed his eyes.
“That’s what I think it was, isn’t it?”
“Fusion core overload,” Bogdanov agreed, his voice slightly sick. “Unless I’m badly mistaken…initiated by remote. Someone just blew those people up to make sure they didn’t surrender.”
A horrified thought hit Brad as he studied the dispersing wreckage of the cruiser.
“Is the transport still with us?” he demanded.
Bogdanov checked.
“Yes,” he confirmed. “They’re dead in the water, but they’re still with us.”
“I want those last jammers of Falcone’s on her now,” Brad snapped. “Nobody is sending a message to that ship until I say so; are we clear?”
The destroyer trembled as the refitted torpedoes launched into space a few moments later, and he surveyed the battlefield and swallowed hard. He wished he’d thought to send the jammers sooner, but he hadn’t been expecting anyone to be bouncing around suicide signals.
He should have known better. The Cadre was far too willing to sacrifice patsies and even commit suicide themselves for them to truly be “merely” pirates.
“Then let’s coordinate search-and-rescue with Andre,” he said quietly. “It’s time to see just what this mess cost.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
Seven ships floated in deep space, shuttles circling around them as they picked up the escape pods and survivors.
Somehow, Brad was unsurprised that there were no survivors from the two cruisers. If there was one glaring sign that the Cadre was not what it pretended to be, it was the repeated willingness to fight to the death on the part of what he would have thought were ordinary pirates.
Escape pods had managed to launch clear of the two Lancers. They weren’t his people’s priority, but they were there, and his people were keeping a careful eye on them to make sure they didn’t lose anyone who’d made it this far.
The first priority was the wreckage of the corvettes and the pods from Longbow. Brad was waiting in the bay as the shuttle delivered the pod from the carrier’s bridge. He was, quite correctly as it turned out, expecting Kate Falcone to be spitting nails.
“That fucking bastard,” she snapped. “The whole trip, he’s sitting there with a button that could launch me into space, just smiling at me. Where is he?”
“He’s gone,” Brad said quietly. “He rammed Longbow into one of the cruisers and detonated the nukes in her magazines. Which”—he sighed—“means we almost certainly ha
ve a Fleet patrol headed our way already.
“I plan on staying right here and waiting for them,” he continued. “That’ll give us time to make sure we don’t miss anyone.”
“The corvettes?” Falcone asked after swallowing an angry breath.
Brad shook his head.
“We’re still looking, but our only chance is loose dutchmen,” he admitted. “There were no pods launched, nothing. There wasn’t enough warning.”
“Any survivors from the cruisers?”
“None. I don’t think Michaels’s target expected him to detonate twenty-four nuclear bombs in their face…and the other was self-destructed by a remote instruction.”
The Agent hissed.
“From where?”
“We don’t know,” Brad said. “I’m guessing the TMF transport…but I don’t know.”
“And the transport?”
He shook his head.
“They’re crippled and jammed,” he told her. “Saburo is aboard, but they’re refusing to surrender. Last I heard, he’d killed the helium feeds to stop them blowing themselves up with the fusion core and was about to storm Engineering.”
A task that would come with yet another price tag to add to this already expensive day. Jason was gone. Shelly was gone. Jace was gone. What a mess this all was.
“This better be worth it, Kate,” Brad continued. “I lost too many people—too many friends today.”
“You took the convoy intact?”
“Four destroyers, as much use as they’ll be to anyone,” he told her. “The transport…well, I suspect they’ve already blown their computers.”
“We’ll break all five of them down, find everything,” she promised him. “Plus what we learned from Longbow and Michaels, I should have a case against Transplanetary. They’re going to regret this Everdarkened game they chose to play.”
“I hope so.”
“I know it doesn’t help, but the Agency will pay you handsomely for this op,” Falcone told him. “If I can swing it, you’ll get the ships once we’re done with them—or equivalents.”
