Killswitch: A Cassandra Kresnov Novel (v1.1)

by Joel Shepherd

  A signal light flashed above the bridge's main security door. Verjee saw one of the marines on guard signal to him, and walked over, down the central aisle of chairs before multigraphical display screens. The first blast door opened, then closed behind him. Then the outer door, with a massive hiss of hydraulics. Reichardt was waiting in the metal hall beyond, lightly armoured and with a sidearm at his hip. It was less armour than Fifth Fleet personnel were wont to wear about the docks these days-snipers had accounted for five soldiers so far, one of them an officer, although none of the injuries were serious. Despite repeated sweeps, and extensive interrogation of suspects, they still hadn't found all the culprits. Soft Callayan civvies or not, they were proving remarkably stubborn once aroused, and reports indicated the other three stations were no better.

  "Captain," said Verjee, with a nod. Reichardt returned it. Some times there were salutes, between captains of equal rank. And sometimes not. Now, it hardly seemed appropriate. "What can I do for you?"

  "Stop being an arrogant puss-head and change your mind."

  Verjee smiled, tiredly. Glanced about at the fully armoured marines guarding the bridge doors. Reichardt's own small contingent from Mekong waited several metres down the corridor, fronted by Lieutenant Nadaja. Nadaja was known by reputation from several major battles during the war. Her broad, African face was neither attractive nor expressive. Verjee had seen bulkheads that radiated greater warmth. The marines too wore light armour, with breastplates and webbing, but no faceplates or powerpacks. That too was defiance-it openly differentiated Third Fleet from Fifth before all the station's people. The Third Fleet had nothing to fear from Callayan locals, it meant. And thus condemned them, in the eyes of many captains of the Fifth, as traitors.

  "Change my mind about what, Captain?" Verjee replied finally, glancing wearily up at him. Reichardt was too damn tall to be a Fleet carrier captain. God knew how he fit into his command chair, let alone through the numerous smaller hatches. He was also a sandy-haired, coarse-mannered, undisciplined, arrogant American with an appallingly irritating Texan accent. Verjee could not help but respect Reichardt's formidable combat record. But the man clearly didn't like him, and he saw no point in bothering to conceal his own opinions.

  ,,You know."

  "You know, William, I really don't." Verjee shrugged, expansively. "There's nothing left to discuss. It's over. The Fleet will get its way. As if there was ever really any doubt."

  Reichardt winced slightly as he scratched an itch on his scalp. The man didn't even bother with a helmet. "That's your final position?"

  "What are you even doing here?" Verjee said in exasperation. "You've got a meeting down that hall, the others will not leave their ships until you're in the room, I suggest you go there and sit down before someone decides to have you rounded up and put there forcibly."

  That was security too-none of the Fifth Fleet captains wanted to be sitting together in a meeting room without Reichardt sitting there first. If he tried something, or had the room rigged somehow with the rebel terrorists he was doubtless in communication with, it would happen to him too.

  "I don't suppose that would be you making that decision, would it, Aral?" Reichardt remarked wryly.

  "Captain," Verjee replied, with mock sincerity, "you know I hold you in the highest esteem."

  Reichardt smiled at him, grimly. "That's what I thought," he said. And he pulled the sidearm from his holster, and shot Verjee in the head.

  The next two rounds went straight through the guard's visorplate at point-blank range. It shattered in a spray of blood, the armoured body collapsing with a crash as Nadaja's fire took down the second. Alarms rang, deafeningly, Sergeant Pollard leaping across one body to the access panel as the armoured outer door slid rapidly closed. Reichardt stepped back as Nadaja leaped past, headed for the corridor's opposite end as Twan did the same in the other direction. Pollard fed a card from his portable unit into the access slot and began feeding in code as the outer doors crashed closed. Private Anwar provided cover at his side.

  The corridor abruptly rang with the thunder of Nadaja's rifle fire, then screams from further down above the racket of alarms. Then from Twan at the other end, multiple bursts and a grenade that detonated with the familiar sharp crack of an AP round, and more screaming. Pollard stared at his handheld screen, apparently oblivious, watching the patterns and numbers count down. Then, with a hiss, the sirens silenced, and the bridge doors hissed open.

  Reichardt pulled a grenade and flattened himself to the side bulkhead. The second door opened, and fire ripped from within, hammering the corridor wall even as Anwar fired a rifle grenade through the gap, fading left before the fire could reach him. An explosion tore the bridge even as an answering grenade hit the corridor wall, Reichardt, Pollard and Anwar ducked and covered as the explosion blew them sideways and peppered their armour. Reichardt recovered and on reflex threw his own around the corner. It detonated with a heavier, concussive thud, followed by a lot of white smoke. Anwar charged in, Pollard following, visors in place and rifles blazing with sharp, precise bursts, spreading chaos before them.

  Reichardt followed, immediately aware that Nadaja and Twan were planting their mines and falling back at speed. Wincing through the blinding smoke, Reichardt went straight to the inner hatch access, not even bothering to raise his pistol or make out targets as Pollard and Anwar's rifle fire continued. He found the access panel and began punching in his own, new code, as more explosions and rifle fire erupted from the corridor outside. Nadaja burst in as the first doors began to close.

  "Twan's dead," she said, and covered the doors as they whined closed once more. Within the bridge, firing had stopped. Someone was gurgling and moaning horribly, somewhere within that choking white smoke. The doors thudded closed, sealing them in. A single shot from somewhere along the central aisle, and the moaning stopped. That would be Anwar, Reichardt reckoned. Twan was his friend.

  Reichardt strode down the central aisle, wincing through the smoke as he stepped over more bodies. Found the central docking post, hauled a body from the chair and dumped it aside, then called up specific berths upon the main screen-Berths Twelve and Seventeen. Mekong, and the recently docked freighter Jennifer, and deactivated the control overrides that kept the main hatches locked. Then he called up Berth Two, where Amazon was docked, and Berth Four, which was Euphrates. And began shutting down all air, water and other umbilical systems, and locking the docking jaws into place. At the neighbouring com post, incoming lights blinked furiously. A loud, negative beep emitted from the blast door access, as someone outside fed in the wrong code.

  "Better work," murmured Pollard at his side, meaning the door. The smoke was beginning to clear now, fans humming in the ceiling corners.

  "League code," Reichardt replied as he worked. "Embedded into the subroutines for emergency overrides two years ago. Kresnov said she wrote it herself."

  "Better work," said Pollard. And Reichardt knew exactly what he meant.

  When the Jennifer's hatchway opened, Vanessa led the way. Fully armoured and environment-sealed, she didn't feel the deep chill of the passage, nor smell the distinctive, metallic tang of dockside air that she recalled from her first off-world trip, when she'd been a little girl. Tac-net was not yet established, and she didn't have a feed from the bridge, but there was no time to waste. She burst from the main access and found herself on the elevated entrance platform upon the docks, with vast, curving expanses of steel stretching away to either side. And, true to their word, friendly dockworkers had stacked numerous shipping crates about the entrance for cover.

  It didn't stop the two patrolling marines directly opposite from firing, and she dove in a crashing roll down the steps as shots hit the station wall behind. At dock level she came to her feet with a grenade in hand, primed for impact fuse and lobbed over the sheltering crates ... she half spun about one corner, predicting the fast run for cover, and nailed one marine with a vicious volley that sent torn armour spinning and shattere
d the shopfront windows against the far wall. That marine fell, the grenade exploded, and the next Callayan trooperCal-T, the newly christened abbreviation was-nailed the second as the blast knocked him over.

  And then they were pouring out onto the docks, a clatter of armoured footsteps and terse, sharp commands upon local tac-net ... the uplink signal arrived from station bridge, and Vanessa patched her suitcom into the local station network. Tac-net established itself with a torrential inflow of information, rapidly building a 3-D picture across her visor even as she ran across the docks to cover on the far wall where she could get a good look along the neighbouring berths. The station alarms were blaring, warning people to get off the docks, but the massive section seals were yet to descend from the ceiling to divide the station into pressurised segments. Rapid movement would assist the attackers and hurt the defenders.

  Tac-net then linked the feed from Mekong through the bridge, and suddenly she could see the entire, doughnut shaped station, the positions of all the ships, and now the new flood of Third Fleet marines pouring onto the docks from the Mekong's position.

  "Watch your spacing!" a sergeant was yelling as Cal-Ts established firing positions about the docking crates, then raced across the open docks toward the inner wall. "Don't bunch up, watch your spacing!" Along the inner wall, the few civilians allowed on the docks during the Fifth Fleet's curfew quickly scurried into doorways. Several spacers were sprinting toward their berths, for the safety of their ships. Well, Vanessa thought as she watched the CDF's first major combat action in its history unfold across the tac-net, at least they had the first element achieved. Surprise. And then she had com with the bridge.

  "Bridge is secure," came Reichardt's voice upon the command channel. "I reckon you've got twenty minutes until they get the equipment up and cut through these doors. "

  "We'll be there," Vanessa replied. "I'm not getting a feed on station systems yet, what can you tell me?"

  "We're still accessing it ... we've got just four people here to run bridge systems and none of us are experts. Section seals we can't guarantee, nor the other emergency overrides, a lot of them are activated by local emergency systems in case of fire, decompression or GBS. But if you move quick, we reckon we can get you where you need to go. "

  "Speed's our plan, Captain," said Vanessa, as soldiers clattered past her, headed into dockside doors and through the passages beyond. All were on tac-net, and saw what she saw, but tac-net only knew what was fed into it, and those sources were always less than perfect. A shot cracked past from somewhere up the curving slope ahead-and was returned instantly, rounds zipping just under the low overhead, striking on a down-angle amidst a cluster of shipping crates and transport flatbeds. "Give us a fix on the other captains as soon as you can if any of them are off their ships, and keep an eye on Corona. We'd like to get Takawashi too, if we can."

  `Just take the damn station first, Major, then we'll worry about the details. "

  Still the Cal-Ts came, in pairs at several points across the dock, supported by sporadic covering fire. Tac-net showed squads forming up within the corridors, then moving out in tight, coordinated formations. Just like Sandy had trained them. Vanessa gritted her teeth and stayed low in the cover of her window. Her own squad were well back in the departure order from Jennifer, and tactical doctrine said that effective second-in-command could not lead the main formations into the station's guts, however determined she'd been to lead them out, for morale alone. In the corridors, pointmen were always first to hit the GBS, as Reichardt had put it-marine slang for General Bad Shit. CDF majors were not, she'd had it forcibly explained to her, expendable.

  Upon that thought, tac-net highlighted a particular red dot coming across the docks, and she turned her head to watch a tall, loping suit of armour come to a crashing halt beside one doorway, covering as his squad went through behind. Then General Krishnaswali followed his troops in at speed. Some damn argument that had been. But if second- and third-in-command were going in, there was no way in hell anyone was going to be able to tell the General that he had to watch it all from an armchair in Tanusha.

  As for the acting third-in-command, who had so valiantly delegated her command position to Vanessa ... well, Vanessa reckoned she ought to be making a move right about ... now.

  The shipping crate's seal exploded outward as Sandy and Rhian's armoured feet hit it simultaneously. Cold air flooded in, or at least the armour suit sensors said it did, and Sandy rolled quickly from her cramped containment and swung a rifle about the edge and down. Two young men stood frozen in the below-docks gloom, staring first at the quarter-ton side of metal that had boomed to the decking before them, and then at the mean, visored figure levelling a rifle at their heads.

  "Commander?" one of them said, recovering faster than his friend. A tall, broad young man in his late teens. "Hafez Bhargouti. My friend, Simon." With a gesture to his companion. Sandy rolled from the crate and thudded neatly to the ground two metres below. Rhian did similar, facing the other way.

  This portion of the lower-decks cargo space was a long conveyor of overhead grapples, holding crates suspended along a gloomy passage of bulkheads, exposed pipes and internals. It was chillingly cold. Beyond Hafez and Simon loomed the huge scanner paddles, four metres tall on either side of the conveyor, peering into the contents of every container as it passed. Unmanned for now, its marine contingent fled topside now that the shooting had broken out.

  "Where are they?" Sandy asked, rifle levelled past the two young men.

  "There's a guard," said Hafez, eyes more urgent than scared. He couldn't have been more than sixteen, Sandy reassessed, despite his size. But immediately she was impressed. Given the reputation of his father-Mohummed Bhargouti, leader of the Nehru Station dockworkers' revolt and unseen since the Fleet had thrown him and most of the station crew into confinement-that was hardly surprising. "One section across, you'll run into him if don't know where."

  "Stay between us," Sandy told him, "someone might come to check out that noise." She edged past and advanced at a walk, rifle levelled. Her suit uplinks found the local network nodes, and locked in ... tacnet unfolded in a rush, the assault shown well under way, CDF thrusts penetrating rapidly into the station bowels, headed for the captured bridge, the rail transit system, key local control nodes to secure life support and other systems in their sector, and into the station's main three-arm, the only way up to secure the station hub, and thus the powerplant.

  In fact, it all looked extremely familiar. Mekong's troops were out on the docks too, five berths down from Jennifer. Defensively, that entire section of docks was solid. But Nehru Station was the central hub for the Fifth Fleet occupation, and currently docked two carriers and four other, smaller contingent warships. Maybe 1050 Fleet marines, plus a hundred spacer personnel who might fight, if they couldn't make it back to their ships. CDF stealth shuttles had docked with the Jennifer three days ago, on approach from a far-side trajectory and unnoticed by Fleet vessels, which were more worried about potential Third Fleet reinforcements than CDF launches from the ground. Let alone CDF launches from Deccan, the third continent, upon the far side of the planet from Tanusha. Jennifer's captain had not been happy at the forced conversion to the CDF's trojan horse, but it was a Callayan registered vessel, and if its owners wanted to keep their licence (and not get thrown in prison for obstructing Callayan security) they were strongly advised not to protest. Jennifer had held 245 of the CDF's best troops, crammed into its various holds. Mekong provided another 300. The numbers were not on their side. But as she'd always told those under her command-it wasn't what you had, it was what you did with it. And what help you got along the way.

  Hafez directed them past where the conveyor rail doglegged toward main storage. They ducked under suspended, unmoving containers, then edged quickly through a narrow serviceway alongside massive fuel pipes that ran to the berth umbilicals from the station's own storage tanks. There was no gunfire or general activity to be heard above the whine of
generators and section pumps, a familiar, industrial white noise that permeated everything, like the dim fluorescent light. From the worn state of their heavy jackets, boots and dockworker overalls, Sandy reckoned Hafez and Simon were familiar enough with the environment. Some station kids grew up in orbit above planets they'd never even visited, nor wanted to. These two looked like dock rats through and through.

  Sandy followed Hafez's directions up a service ladder, along a cramped walkway above the fuel pipes, avoiding turnoffs and crawlways that tac-net told her would serve, but Hafez insisted were rigged with Fleet sensor gear the dockers had somehow noticed without detection. Then they ducked into a cramped metal engineering space that Sandy was sure would have smelled of lubricant grease and bad ventilation, if such things could have penetrated her faceplate. Under more pipes, then, and into a crawlway, within the mouth of which waited another teenager-a girl this time-looking pale and scared, to assure them that the coast was clear.

  Crawling in armour through a cramped metal crawlway with a weapon in hand was not an easy thing to do silently, even for a GI. Sandy knew, as she concentrated on that task, precisely why her guides were all children. Most of their parents were either locked up, or missing, having refused to work under Fifth Fleet control, even when threatened at gunpoint. Some, reliable reports from inside had indicated, had been beaten. Or worse, many feared, in attempts to root out the remaining rebels, who were hiding in the dark, cramped places like this, places that engineers and dock rats knew well, but suits and topsiders rarely ventured. Although many of the suits hadn't fared much better, and were even protecting and assisting the rebels ... or were rebels themselves. Indeed, word was that relations between topsiders and dock rats had never been so good, two disparate, mutually disdainful cultures united by a common threat. And if that wasn't a good metaphor for much of Callay at this moment, Sandy reckoned, then she didn't know what was.