Falcone Strike

by Christopher Nuttall

  “They can sort that out afterwards,” Kat said firmly. She shook her head. “Are they trained on handling the communicators too?”

  “We’re doing that now,” the XO assured her. “They should be able to maintain communications with a stealthed platform even after we leave the system. They’ll be on their own for long periods, but they will still be able to leave messages for us . . . when, of course, we manage to slip a spy ship back into the system.”

  Kat nodded. It wasn’t the best way to communicate, but in the absence of a StarCom there was no other choice. The Commonwealth would take the offensive, sooner or later, and when it did they’d need to make contact—again—with the resistance on Verdean. It might make liberating the system for good a far easier task.

  “Then make sure you get some rest, once we’re on the way,” she ordered. “It won’t get any easier from now on.”

  She keyed the console again. This time, it showed a pair of expanding message spheres: one centered on UNAS-RD-46785, the other on the unnamed penal world. The first sphere had already overlapped Aswan, while the second was only a couple of days from the Theocratic fleet base. It was quite likely the Theocracy had already realized they’d lost a convoy. She’d had the prisoners interrogated until they’d spilled everything they knew, but none of them had been quite sure just how much leeway was built into the system. The Commonwealth would wait at least a week before panicking—ships could be overdue without running into pirates or raiders—yet was that true of the Theocracy? They might start sounding the alarm if the courier boat was even an hour overdue.

  But that would be stupid, she told herself. Even without enemy inter ference, a courier boat could be delayed by any number of problems. A freak storm in hyperspace might even blow her light years off course.

  She ran through the problem in her own head. Assuming Aswan realized the courier boat was overdue at the earliest possible moment, without any leeway at all, warning messages could already be on their way to Verdean. She knew she didn’t dare assume otherwise, even though logic told her there would be some leeway. Verdean might well be ready for her when she arrived.

  They don’t know what we have, she thought, grimly. Nothing escaped the ambush, unless they had a covert satellite watching for trouble . . .

  “We’ll revise departure and leave in two hours,” she said instead. There was no point in worrying too much; she’d assume the worst, probing the system before she committed herself and backing off if it looked like too much of a challenge. “I’ll want to speak to the patrol boat commanders before we go.”

  “Aye, Captain,” the XO said.

  “And make a note in the logs,” Kat added. “The commander and crew of HMS Mermaid are to be commended for the first sweep of a Theocratic fleet base. They’ll be in line for a medal when we return home.”

  The XO nodded, then saluted and left the cabin. Kat looked back at the display, unable to stop a cold hand clenching at her heart. The enemy had to know, now, that something was wrong. Her squadron’s presence would no longer be a secret. Hell, she’d never meant it to remain a secret indefinitely—the idea was to force them to react to her presence—but she couldn’t help feeling nervous. Two squadrons of superdreadnoughts could rip her ships apart with ease, if the enemy got lucky. And they might well manage to get lucky, if she made a single mistake . . .

  Then you’d better not make one, she told herself, firmly. As long as you pick your targets with care, they shouldn’t be able to guess your next destination.

  She sighed, then brought up the intelligence reports. They now knew more about the sector, enough to pick the next target. And there were several possibilities . . .

  “Ringer might be the best bet,” she muttered after a moment. “And it might hurt the enemy quite badly if we struck a handful of blows, then vanished.”

  * * * * *

  “These weapons are awesome, sir,” Jean-Luc said. “They’re pieces of crap,” Sergeant Dervish said. He was from a refugee family, he’d explained; Jean-Luc had been disappointed to discover that none of the refugees attached to the squadron had come from Verdean. “This is an assault rifle broken down to the bare basics, designed for illiterate baboons who can’t shoot for toffee. I was playing with one after we captured the convoy and the aiming is appallingly bad.”

  Jean-Luc smiled. “At least you’re pumping bullets in the general direction of the enemy . . .”

  “The enemy is likely to be the safest person on the field,” Dervish said. He sneered down at the rifle. “Accuracy goes to shit outside a few meters, young man; you’d need to spray and pray just to have a reasonable chance of hitting something. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought they were unloading older pieces of crap onto planetary militia and other local defense forces.”

  He shook his head. “There were a handful of sniper rifles,” he added, “but nothing I’d consider satisfactory. I’ve seen better weapons coming off private workbenches or locked away in museums, weapons that might actually hurt the enemy.”

  “It’s still better than anything we had before the invasion,” Jean-Luc said.

  “Better than anything we had too,” Dervish admitted. “Or so my father says, when he’s in his cups. He spent all of his courage and determination just getting his family off-world before our new masters clamped down on us. If we’d spent money on weapons . . .”

  He snorted. “Aragon wasn’t a spacefaring power,” he added after a moment. “If we’d spent money on weapons, we would probably have been crushed anyway.”

  Jean-Luc frowned. “What was it like? Going to the Commonwealth, I mean?”

  “I was four years old,” Dervish said. “We spent a couple of years in a refugee camp, then Dad got his papers and started to work. I went to school when I was five, then joined the cadet force at seven. By the time I went to boot camp, I was pretty much identical to everyone else. I don’t really remember life before the Commonwealth at all.”

  “Oh,” Jean-Luc said.

  Jean-Luc looked down at the weapon in his hands. He’d been offered—they’d all been offered—the chance to stay with the squadron and eventually return to the Commonwealth, once the starships had completed their mission. He had to admit he’d been tempted—after a year on a penal world, his enthusiasm for continuing the fight had dimmed—but he was damned if he was abandoning his homeworld as long as there was something he could do. Besides, it wasn’t as if he had any useful skills. He hadn’t been training to be a starship pilot or an engineer even before the Theocracy had interrupted his education. There was no way he could justify remaining with the starships to himself, let alone to anyone else.

  Dervish had been lucky, he suspected. He’d escaped early enough that he had no emotional tie to his homeworld. The Commonwealth was his home now. But Jean-Luc? To run from his homeworld would be the act of a coward. And besides, Perrier and the others were going back too, ready to try to make contact with what remained of the resistance or set up a new one. The attack on the system would prove to the population that the Theocracy could be beaten . . .

  Assuming it comes off as planned, he thought. If the starships have to retreat, we will be unable to land.

  The Marine cleared his throat. “Did you read the textbooks?”

  “I tried,” Jean-Luc said. “I wish I had more time to practice.”

  “Us too,” Dervish said. “Six months of training didn’t feel like enough when I went into combat for the first time.”

  Jean-Luc shrugged. He’d barely known which end of a gun to point at the enemy when he’d gone into combat, although—to be fair—it hadn’t been planned that way. The Theocracy had launched a kill-sweep for insurgents and overrun his training base, forcing him and his fellow recruits to fight and run. All things considered, he’d been lucky his career as a daring resistance fighter hadn’t ended there and then. Instead, he’d survived a year before finally being captured.

  “I meant to ask,” he said, “why do you have all these manuals?�
��

  “We had a few insurgencies of our own to handle,” Dervish said. “And we knew we were likely to lose worlds to the Theocracy, so we set up stay-behind units and issued training on guerrilla war. It was one of the many compromises that went into effect when the Commonwealth was actually founded. Just about everyone receives some form of firearms training.”

  “You said,” Jean-Luc recalled, “that it would have made a difference if everyone was armed?”

  “On your homeworld?” Dervish asked. “I think it would have resulted in a great many more dead on both sides, but would it have made a real difference? I don’t know. The Theocracy might have decided that keeping you alive was too much trouble and blasted your world back to bedrock. Or they might have just kept piling on the rocks until you surrendered. As long as they held the high orbitals, you would have been fucked.”

  “Then we need to wait for you to return,” Jean-Luc said despondently.

  “Yes,” Dervish agreed. “But you will have time to make preparations and wait.”

  * * * * *

  The spy lay on his bunk, staring up at the ceiling. There didn’t seem to be any way out of the trap. The longer he delayed, the clearer it would become that he was delaying . . . and then his handlers would kill his sister, perhaps betraying him to the CIS as well. He’d hoped that something would happen that would save him from having to commit treason, but nothing had materialized. Maybe a missile would strike the ship, killing him and him alone, or he would be reassigned to a department where there was no hope of getting a message out without being detected. Nothing had happened . . . and now he was trapped.

  It was easy enough to skim through the ship’s datanet, once one was allowed through the firewall . . . and, as a tactical officer, he was permitted access to almost every part of the ship’s computers. He knew where the captain intended to attack, he knew where she wanted to go next; he even knew where the fleet train was waiting, safely away from the squadron. And getting that information to the Theocracy wouldn’t be difficult . . .

  Damned if I do , he thought. It would be the first step into outright treason; no, he’d made that choice the moment he’d decided not to report the contact to the CIS. And damned if I don’t.

  He closed his eyes in bitter pain, then opened them and reached for his datapad. Maybe someone would stumble across his work before it was too late . . . but he knew it wasn’t going to happen. He’d erase all evidence of his tampering as soon as his work was done. And then . . .

  They find a use for the data, he thought. And hopefully everything will end.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “You know,” Midshipwoman Grace Hawthorne said, “one could say this system has potential.” “I suppose one could,” Lieutenant Lars Rasmussen said. “But you’d have to get rid of the occupying forces first.”

  He nodded to himself coldly. Mermaid had probed the system carefully, very carefully, hunting for signs of enemy activity. Verdean wasn’t exactly Tyre or even Cadiz, but it wasn’t a groundhog system by any definition of the word. A handful of industrial nodes dating back to the UN, he thought, orbited Verdean itself, while an old-style cloudscoop drew HE3 from the gas giant. Judging by the handful of freighters orbiting the structure, Verdean produced much of the HE3 for the sector as well as its own requirements. He was mildly surprised the Theocracy had even left it intact, but maybe it wasn’t too surprising. They’d be able to keep a cloudscoop isolated from the remainder of the system with ease.

  “Then set up a larger asteroid mining operation,” Grace added. “You could probably have a small-scale shipyard within five years, then start producing your own ships and start expanding further.”

  “No doubt,” Lars agreed. “But that does still leave the problem of a large and powerful occupation force.”

  He peered down at the passive sensors, frowning. There was nothing on Verdean I, as far as he could tell, but Verdean III—a Mars-type world—had a dozen radio sources on the planet’s surface and a small network of satellites orbiting it. An industrial base, or penal camp, or what? It didn’t look as though the Theocracy was attempting to terraform the world, but they might simply be choosing to use one of the longer ways to turn a dead world into a decent place to live. Or they didn’t want to terraform the planet. It wasn’t as if it would help the war effort.

  “There’s relatively few signals coming from Verdean itself,” Grace added. “The dark side of the planet is . . . well, dark.”

  She was right, Lars realized. A spacer looking down on Tyre’s dark side would have known the planet was heavily industrialized, if only because he or she saw the planet’s lights blurring into a glowing mass. But Verdean was dark; only a handful of lights could be seen, concentrated around the major cities. He hadn’t seen anything like it, outside a pastoral world where anything more advanced than the spinning jenny was banned; it suggested, strongly, that the Theocracy was crushing the life out of the locals. The sight sent cold shivers running down his spine.

  “Make a note of all the sources,” he ordered. He swore under his breath as two fast-moving icons appeared on the display, zipping around the planet on patrol. “Gunboats?”

  “Looks that way,” Grace said. “No idea what they’re doing here.”

  “Causing trouble,” Lars muttered. The Theocracy needed to work up its ships and squadrons, just like the Commonwealth, but he wouldn’t have expected them to do it in an occupied system. Maybe they had been having problems with pirates and wanted to make a show of strength. “That’s an unexpected complication.”

  “I can’t see a carrier,” Grace said after a moment. “They must be based on one of the orbiting stations.”

  “Probably,” Lars said. It wasn’t common to use gunboats for system patrol, at least in the Commonwealth, but the Theocracy might have evolved a different doctrine. “One large orbital station, a number of automated weapons platforms, and now a gunboat squadron.”

  “Maybe more than one,” Grace said. “We don’t know anything about their deployment patterns.”

  Lars frowned. “True,” he conceded, finally. If the Theocracy had copied the UN’s doctrine, they’d have somewhere between nine and twelve gunboats assigned to a squadron. On the other hand, the UN hadn’t fought a proper war until the Breakaway conflict and it had lost so comprehensively that it had never had a chance to reevaluate its doctrine. “We’ll have to assume the worst.”

  He took a long look at the planet, then sighed. “Take us back out of the system,” he ordered after a moment. They hadn’t picked up any hint of early-warning satellites, but passive sensors probably wouldn’t until it was too late. “We’ll slip back into hyperspace once we’re out of sensor range.”

  “Aye, Captain,” Grace said.

  * * * * *

  “Home,” Jean-Luc said. Looking at the holographic image, he couldn’t help feeling a trace of awe. He’d never seen his homeworld from orbit, not even when he’d been taken prisoner and transported to the penal colony. The Theocracy had shoved him and his fellow prisoners into boxes and left them there until they’d finally reached their new home. Several of them had died along the way, too weak or hungry to last long enough to survive. Now, he was back . . .

  Perrier coughed. “Can you break through the defenses?”

  “Yes,” Captain Falcone said. “We’ll have to lay waste to the system’s industry, though.”

  Jean-Luc swallowed. “We need that industry!”

  “The Theocracy controls it,” Captain Falcone said. Her voice was gentle, but there was no give in it at all. “We’ll help you to rebuild after liberation, I promise. But until then, we cannot allow the Theocracy to continue to use it against us.”

  “And there’s no hope of preventing them from retaking control of the high orbitals,” Perrier added. “There would be no time to build up our defenses before we lost control, again.”

  He sighed. “Do what you need to do, Captain,” he said. “We’ll send you the bill later.”

  T
he captain smiled. “We’ll leave the freighters back here,” she said. “The clock will start ticking the moment we enter the system, so have your people ready to move in and disembark as soon as possible. I estimate we will have less than three days before the Theocracy responds to the attack.”

  Jean-Luc swallowed. He’d thought himself ready to return to the fray, but now . . .

  “I understand,” Perrier said. “We will be ready.”

  “Good,” the captain said. “We’ll transfer you over to the freighters, then jump into the system; we’ll come back to get you once the battle is over. Good luck.”

  “Thank you, Captain,” Perrier said.

  * * * * *

  “ Thundergod is to take out the cloudscoop and any freighters within range,” Kat ordered as she took her command chair. “Inform Captain Bannister that I want her to time her attack so that it goes in at the same moment as ours.”

  “Aye, Captain,” the XO said.

  “There is to be no attempt to capture the cloudscoop,” Kat added. “I just want it smashed. If she can take out the freighters first, without compromising her ability to deal with the cloudscoop, she is to do so, but the cloudscoop is her priority target.”

  “Aye, Captain,” the XO said again.

  Kat nodded, then settled back in her command chair. They’d gone through everything Mermaid had brought back with a fine-tooth comb and she knew they should have the advantage, but it was quite possible that something had been missed. Perhaps there was an enemy cruiser squadron lying doggo, ready to spring a trap, or even a whole formation of gunboats. Kat knew, from bitter experience, that gunboats were less effective against ships and squadrons that were prepared for them, but they’d still be a nasty opponent. Her formation’s point defense datanet simply wasn’t up to modern standards.