by Rick Partlow
O’Keefe was about to offer her some condolence, when Kage interrupted. “Where is Antonov going?”
“He left nearly a hundred biomechs behind at the bunker,” Shannon told him. “He abandoned them as if they were superfluous. I’m guessing he’s going somewhere he can get a lot more.”
* * *
General Sergei Pavlovitch Antonov, former leader of the Russian Protectorate, former ruler of Eastern Europe and part of Asia, former ruler of the Novoye Rodina system and a dozen others, surveyed his army with an air of satisfaction long delayed. They were seated on dozens of benches, row upon row, in a square half a kilometer long by half a kilometer wide. Each of them was in simple, unmarked grey body armor and each was attached to feeding and waste removal tubes through hookups in the armor.
They sat motionless and silent, thousands of them, like a high-tech terra-cotta army in the harsh, sharp-edged shadows cast by the industrial lighting of the old warehouse. Here and there, human technicians walked among their ranks, tending to the feeding machines or emptying the waste disposal tanks; here and there one would pull off a helmet and make an adjustment to the hookups.
Antonov watched them for a moment more, then hit the control to darken the window that looked out from the office to the main floor of the warehouse. He looked over to Kevin Fourcade, who stood by the utilitarian metal desk, still watching over Brendan Riordan. The executive was no longer blindfolded, but his hands were still cuffed in front of him and his expression was sullen and fearful as he sat quietly in a chair much too small for his bulk. Every so often, he glanced almost unnoticeably at the handgun Fourcade kept trained on him.
“I have to thank you, Mr. Riordan,” Antonov said in a booming voice, smiling broadly. “None of this would have been possible without your limitless ambition and hunger for power. I can respect that.” He stepped over to the man, grabbing the square chin in a hand and turning Riordan’s face toward him. “The difference between us, tovarisch, is that I want power for the good of the oppressed people of this world, while you want it merely for your own glorification.” He let the man go, shrugging expressively. “Still, you may yet be of use to me…perhaps, if you prove yourself able, I can find a place for you in my new government.”
Fourcade cocked his head to the side as a call came in over his ‘link. He spoke softly to the caller for a moment, then turned to Antonov. “We can find a use for him right now, sir,” he said. “The vehicles are ready to ship out---all we need is his authorization.” Fourcade pulled a tablet from his jacket pocket and touched it to his ‘link, syncing their settings, then put it down on the desk next to Riordan.
“If you would be so kind, Brendan…” Antonov nodded towards the tablet.
“And you will be so kind, Brendan,” Fourcade said softly into the big man’s ear, “because I have worked for you for enough years to have many reasons to want to kill you even if he didn’t order me to.”
Riordan glared at him for a moment, but then complied. He placed a thumb on the tablet’s side and winced as it pricked him, drawing blood for DNA analysis. When it confirmed that his DNA sample had been positively identified, he leaned over its audio pickup and spoke slowly and clearly. “Riordan, Brendan Jacob. Authorization E-98.”
“Authorization confirmed,” the tablet announced.
“And there we go,” Fourcade said with satisfaction, snatching the tablet back. “The vehicles will start staging here in a few hours. It shouldn’t take more than a day to get them loaded.”
“It will be more difficult without the Colonial Guard troops to support us,” Antonov mused, “but with McKay and Stark out of the way, and the military’s space assets distracted, it should be enough. By the time our forces break through their ships, we will have the orbital defenses under our control.”
“Even if you win,” Riordan said slowly, his indignation finally overcoming his fear, “you’ll have wrecked everything.” He shook his head in disgust, his matted, sweat-soaked hair flopping limply. “Why bother? You have resources, you have your own worlds, we couldn’t have reached you…why not just leave it alone?”
The good-natured smile never left Antonov’s face, but his gaze went cold as he took a step toward the corporate executive. Riordan flinched instinctively as the Russian’s hand raised, but Antonov merely patted his cheek as one might a toddler who’d said something amusingly naïve.
“Because it is my world,” he told the man, his voice at once warmly condescending and yet as coldly lethal as a blade. “And I will rule it, finally, as is my destiny.” He laughed softly, an unholy sound that sent shivers up Riordan’s back. “I will rule it, Mr. Riordan, or I will watch it burn.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
Drew Franks emerged from the access tube into the engineering section of the RFS Bradley, pausing for a moment to let his head stop spinning before he moved into the chamber. The Brad had been in zero g for over two days now and it was starting to get to him. Staying still until he was sure he wasn’t about to throw up, Franks finally pushed off into the chaotic turmoil of activity that filled the chamber.
Spools of superconductive cable were stretched out across the chamber ready to install, while engineering crew ripped charred lengths of it from burned-out conduits leading to the main trunk line from the fusion reactor. Scorched carbon streaks lined the deck below where the conduits had exploded under stress, filling the chamber with deadly shrapnel that had sent a dozen men and women to the medical bay. On the central station display, he could see shuttles hovering near the midsection of the ship, using loader arms to insert antimatter fuel pods into the heavily armored ports there, while other technicians in vacuum suits oversaw the seating of the pods into the evacuated portion of the engineering bay.
Radio traffic filled the air, a cacophonous racket of overlapping conversations as dozens of men and women worked at a dozen different major tasks. In the center of it all, maintaining a Buddha-like calm in the eye of that storm, was Lt. Commander Maria Infante, the ship’s Chief Engineering Officer. As he watched her, Franks was amazed at the way she seemed to be able to keep track of all those separate conversations and respond to each question while still monitoring the various displays at her station.
He was loath to disturb her when she was obviously insanely busy, but he had a job to do as well, and this wouldn’t wait. He pushed off from the wall and floated across the chamber, twisting in midair to avoid being sideswiped by a preoccupied technician, then stopping himself against the side of the engineering control center console.
“Commander Infante,” he interjected and she looked up at him, still droning orders to three different people.
“Yes, Lt. Franks?” she said, automatically muting the audio inputs to the microphones at her station.
“You’ve seen the effects of field intersect now,” he said, trying to be quick and brief. “I need to know if you can come up with any way we can do it repeatedly without almost destroying ourselves.”
“Why?” she cracked, “Are you planning on making a sport of it?”
“Ma’am,” he went on seriously, “I don’t think the Protectorate is going to quit at two of those things. Eventually, they’re going to throw everything they have at us, and we can’t be knocking a star cruiser out of commission every we have to intercept one of those ramships. I need to know how to take them out.”
“Lieutenant,” she said soberly, shaking her head, “there is no way we can harden the power systems on this ship enough to survive multiple field intersects. We can jury-rig it to barely make it through one, but that’s it without access to a full dry-dock. The gravito-inertial feedback is just too intense. I’d need a whole secondary power trunk, and we just don’t have the equipment to build one…or the time, most likely.”
Franks scowled, wondering what the hell Colonel---oops, that’s General now---McKay would do. He was still wondering when Infante spoke again, her head cocked thoughtfully. “You know, though, Lieutenant, there is something else we might try.�
� She tapped her chin with a finger, forehead scrunched up. “I’ll need to have a little talk with Lt. Bevins…”
The words were barely out of her mouth when a klaxon began sounding over the ship’s speakers, accompanied by the announcement: “All hands, battle stations!”
Franks saw Infante’s eyebrow raise, her mouth quirking in what might have been annoyance.
“Better have that talk now, ma’am,” he suggested. “It looks like we’ve run out of time.”
* * *
“Are we certain they can’t see us, Commander Witten?” Captain Minishimi asked quietly, staring at the Tactical display, watching one icon after another appear out of the wormhole gateway only a few thousand kilometers away.
Witten glanced at her, feeling a rush of gratitude that she was on the bridge and in charge instead of him. She still looked a bit pale, but her voice was strong and she didn’t seem to be in pain. “Fairly certain, Captain,” he responded. “We’re running cool…minimum reactor output, minimum thermal signature. We should be indistinguishable from the background radiation. And we’ve seen no indication that they’re equipped with gravimetic sensors, so they shouldn’t be able to pick us up that way, either.”
“Higgs, what are the chances we can get a message to Fleet HQ without them picking up on it?”
“It’s chancy, ma’am,” Higgs warned. “I think it’s about even odds one of their ships will detect it.”
Joyce Minishimi was silent for a moment, her eyes fixed on the display. Then she sighed softly. “There are only two Fleet cruisers insystem right now,” she said, half to herself, “and the Brad isn’t ready to sail yet.” She looked back to Higgs. “Send to Fleet HQ: Enemy ships are transitioning the wormhole; numbers are estimated to be in the hundreds. We are going to move to engage. End of message. Attach a copy of our current sensor scans.”
“Aye, ma’am,” Higgs acknowledged, turning back to her station.
“Lt. Witten,” the Captain said to the Helm officer, “prepare to activate the drive field and take us in toward the wormhole at one gravity. We’re going to use our drive field as a weapon until they figure out we’re there.”
“Aye, Captain,” Witten responded. “One gravity acceleration at your word.”
“Commander Gianeto,” Captain Minishimi continued, “I want you to launch every Area Denial missile we have right into the wormhole immediately, set to detonate just outside its event horizon.”
“Aye, Captain,” Gianeto was hitting the controls even as he spoke. “Launching all AD munitions now.”
On the Tactical screen, they could see the swarm of small missiles emerging from the weapons pods, accelerating away from the mass of the Decatur, one wave after another launching only seconds apart. It seemed the missiles would never stop, but finally the last were gone, leaving only the glowing stars of their drives slowly fading as they drew away.
“One hundred Area Denial Munition missiles away, ma’am,” Gianeto announced. “We’re cleaned out.”
“Mr. Witten,” she addressed the Helmsman formally, “take us in.”
* * *
“Jesus Christ that’s a lot of ships,” Lt. Wolford muttered, shaking his head as he stared at the sensor display.
“At ease on the bridge!” Commander---acting Captain, Franks reminded himself---Tandy Lee snapped. She was a dark-haired, dark-eyed young officer with café-aux-lait skin and soft, rounded features---and she was as tense and raw as an exposed nerve. She had even less experience than Perez, and when Franks had told her that the Captain was dead, he had thought she was going to go into shock. “Commander Infante,” she said a bit too loudly and harshly into the intercom pickup, “how much longer until we can activate the drives?”
“We have the fuel pods loaded, Captain,” Infante replied, unflappable, “and the new power conduits have been installed; we just have to get the shielding in place. It should just be another few minutes.”
“We have fusion detonations near the wormhole!” Wolford announced, stabbing a finger at the white globes that were popping up in the Tactical projection. Franks moved around behind the man, looking at the readout.
“Those are Area-Denial Munitions,” he said confidently. One of the many things he’d been doing in his spare time to try to make himself more qualified to be a field agent was studying the signatures of various Fleet weapons. “That has to be the Decatur attacking.” He paled as he realized what that meant, turning to face acting Captain Lee. “She’s all alone out there, Captain.”
“Lieutenant,” she ground out impatiently, clearly unhappy about having him on the bridge at all, “we are doing everything we can to get under power and help the Decatur…”
“That’s not what I mean, ma’am,” he cut her off, earning a dirty look. “If she’s engaged with the enemy, they’re going to…”
“Eysselink drive signatures detected!” Wolford exclaimed. “It’s more of those ramships, ma’am…they’re breaking away from the rest of the enemy formation and heading this way!” He swallowed hard as he glanced between Lee and the Tactical display. “There are six of them at least, from what I can read.”
“They’re going to do that,” Franks finished, letting out a sigh.
“Commander Infante!” Lee’s call was almost desperate. “Did you hear that?”
Infante sounded, for once, affected. “Yes, Captain. I’m powering up the drive now. My people can install the shielding on the move.” Franks winced, knowing exactly what that could mean: if they had another field intersect without the shielding in place, everyone in the engineering compartment would be fried instantly.
“Lt. Bevins,” Lee said---trying, Franks thought, to sound more confident than she felt, “plot an intercept course for the ramships and take us to 1g acceleration.”
Lt. Franks braced himself as the acceleration alarm sounded and gravity pressed his feet to the deck, a welcome feeling after days of zero gravity. He stepped over to the Captain’s station and hovered a hand over her communications console, looking a question. She sighed with exasperation but nodded.
“Commander Infante,” he called. “Did you and Bevins have time to work out that modification?”
“I believe it will work, Lt. Franks,” Infante confirmed. “The only way to know for sure is to try it.”
“What will work?” Lee demanded. “What are you talking about?”
“Sorry, ma’am,” Franks told her. “With the alert, we didn’t have time to tell you. Commander Infante was working with Lt. Bevins to try to come up with a new way to stop the ramships…other than, well, ramming them.”
`”What did you come up with, Commander?” Lee asked the engineer.
“Lt, Bevins and I made some adjustments to the gravimetic sensor emitters, Captain,” Commander Infante explained. “Theoretically, we should be able to use it to destabilize the ramships’ Eysselink drive fields, if we can get close enough.”
“How close?” She asked and then scowled and added: “Theoretically?”
“At least a hundred kilometers or so,” Infante said. “And yes, theoretically because it’s never been tried outside a research station. It’s a lucky thing I read about that study; I doubt there’s anyone else in the Fleet that would have thought of it.”
“It’s the only chance we have, Captain Lee,” Franks reminded her. “Intercepting just two of those things almost destroyed this ship and killed Captain Perez…and there are at least a half dozen of them.”
Lee hissed out a deep breath. “We’ll have to try it,” she decided. “Tactical, work up an intercept plan that will give us time on target with as many of the ramships as possible and get us on course.” She shook her head. “I just hope the Decatur can handle the rest of them…”
* * *
It felt inexpressibly good to Francis Witten, after weeks of crawling between wormholes on plasma drives, naked to whatever the enemy wanted to throw at them, to be surrounded once more by the protective sheath of the Eysselink field…even if they were accel
erating directly into the midst of hundreds of enemy ships.
“Thirty seconds to the first wave of enemy ships,” Gianeto announced. “Twenty ships, mostly lighters”---converted freighters---“with about 100 kilometers between them.” His eyes darted to the right, to another section of his Tactical display, where a series of white globes was erupting like a fireworks display. “We have positive detonation from the first of the AD munitions, Captain! I’m reading several secondary explosions too. Don’t know how many of them we took out. Some of them are going through the gate; they must be keeping it activated with a series of fusion triggers.”
“Mr. Witten,” Minishimi directed, “sweep through the first wave of Protectorate ships, starting with those closest to us. Do as much damage as possible before they realize where we are.”
“Aye, Captain,” Witten acknowledged. “Ten seconds to impact with the first target.”
The enemy ship appeared impossibly close on the viewscreen, growing from a barely-perceptible dot to an ungainly, bulbous collection of jury-rigged armor and weapons pods…and then expanding into a ball of glowing plasma as the drive field ripped it to shreds. Witten blinked at the explosion and then it was gone, whisked away along with that particular wave of space-time; and the next ship, almost identical in design, was coming into view. It was gone just as quickly, and Witten tried not to think about all the human lives he’d just ended.
“That’s two of them down,” he announced, touching the controls and dragging the icon of the ship into the course he desired. “Swinging around for the next pair in this wave.”
“Captain!” Gianeto interjected. “I’m picking up multiple Eysselink drive fields near the gate! It looks like five…no, six are splitting off and heading insystem at high g’s.” He glanced back at her. “There are at least two more heading straight for us.”
