Duty, Honor, Planet: The Complete Trilogy

by Rick Partlow

  “Francis!” Larry Gianeto yelled, yanking loose his restraints and lunging across the bridge to the Helm officer. A detached, incredibly calm portion of Minishimi’s shock-numbed brain wondered how the Tactical officer could recover so much more quickly than everyone else from the effects of the collision.

  Gianeto grabbed the back of Witten’s acceleration couch, halting his momentum and feeling for the man’s pulse. Under normal circumstances, he could have checked the man’s vital signs via remote access to the sensors in his uniform, but that was down along with everything else on the ship.

  “Oh, Jesus, he’s not breathing…” Gianeto moaned helplessly. “He doesn’t have a pulse!”

  “Larry,” Minishimi rasped, getting up the strength to pull off her harness. She was remembering something, something even more important than Witten’s condition.

  “What the hell happened to him?” Gianeto demanded of no one in particular, hands clenching and unclenching helplessly, head turning back and forth as if he were trying to find someone to help him.

  “Larry!” Minishimi said more forcefully and his eyes snapped onto her, finally focusing. “We’ll get him to the medical bay,” she promised. “But before the collision…what were you saying?”

  “Oh,” he seemed to come back to reality. “Ma’am,” he said, his voice grim, “I caught a reading of two more ramships coming through the wormhole. They’re headed this way.”

  Minishimi closed her eyes, taking in a deep breath, then letting it out. A preternatural calm had descended on her, as her options were stripped away until only one was left. She opened her eyes and fixed Gianeto with a fond gaze.

  “Larry,” she said gently, “get the bridge crew to the life pods. The intercoms are down; everything is down, we have to abandon ship.”

  She heard a gasp from Maggie Higgs as the woman came to her senses and saw Witten’s body. “Oh my God!” the woman cried. “What happened to him?”

  “Probably a cerebral hemorrhage,” Minishimi told her quietly. “Leave him here, Larry. We can’t help him now.”

  “There’s nothing we can do, Captain?” Gianeto asked her, agony in his eyes as he clung to Witten’s acceleration couch desperately.

  “I’m going to head to engineering and see what the situation is,” she said, shaking her head, “but with enemy ships inbound and no power, we have to get the crew to the pods. I’ll call out to the decks I pass, and you do the same.” She put a hand on his shoulder, squeezing it. “Get moving, Commander.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. He gave Witten once last glance, then looked to the others on the bridge. “Higgs, Mehta, we’re abandoning ship. The comms are down, so Higgs, I want you to take B deck and get the word there; Mehta, take C deck. The Captain is headed for Engineering and I’m going to the hangar bay. Got it?”

  “Aye, sir,” they responded, unstrapping from their seats and following him to the bridge hatch.

  Gianeto pulled open a panel beside the hatch and worked a hand crank, sliding the normally automatic door open at an agonizingly slow rate. Minishimi felt a desperate urgency start to take hold of her, sure that a ramship was bearing down on them at this very moment, ready to rend them into atoms. But she also knew that the life pods weren’t necessarily salvation from that fate…which was why she had to get to Engineering.

  She pushed her way to the front of the crowd and slipped through the portal as soon as Gianeto had it open far enough to fit, then headed for the access tubes.

  “Ma’am!” Gianeto’s voice stopped her and she turned back. His face looked pale and drawn in the chemical ghostlight, and his eyes were clouded with fear. “You’ll be taking one of the lifepods from Engineering?”

  “Yes, Commander,” she assured him, smiling at his concern. “I’ll meet you on the other side.”

  Then she shoved off into the access tube and left the others behind her.

  The tubes were eerily silent, without the usual hum and shudder of the ship’s systems, and the silence beat in her ears like a pulse as she sailed through the near-darkness. Joyce Minishimi’s whole body was a mass of aches, her healing chest wound was flaring with fresh pain and her head felt as if it would explode, but she flew through the narrow tube with reckless abandon, knowing that time was running out and feeling as if the passage would never end.

  She almost missed the exit for Engineering, but managed to brake herself at the last moment, catching a handhold at the expense of a painful wrench to her shoulder and a sharp, stabbing jolt of agony in her chest. She gasped, cradling her arm against her chest, but kept moving, kicking out into the corridor. The hatch to Engineering was closed, and she could see nothing through its viewport, but she didn’t hesitate, moving to the panel beside it and accessing the manual controls. Inside the panel was a hand crank and she worked it with her good arm as quickly as she could, pain shooting through her chest with each turn.

  As the hatch slowly rolled open, a haze of black smoke dotted with bits of particulate metal drifted out of the chamber. With it, she saw as a sense of horror crept through her, drifted a pair of charred and bloodied bodies. She coughed fitfully as the smoke reached her, and she knew that to last in there, she was going to need a respirator. She went to a rack just outside the hatchway and pulled an emergency breather from it, settling the mask over her face and pulling the elastic strap over her head, adjusting it automatically as it tried to yank at her hair.

  Fresh air filled her lungs and she felt relief for the first time in long minutes. Thinking quickly, she grabbed a spare respirator and a flashlight from the cabinet and pushed off into the smoke-filled chamber. Shining the powerful light around the Engine Room, she could see, despite the smoke, exactly what had happened: the main trunklines had exploded with incredible force from the feedback of the second field collision, probably weakened significantly by the first. And when they’d violently overloaded, they’d burst right through the shielding, turning the armored sheaths into shrapnel that had sliced through everything…and everyone…in the room.

  Loose globules of crimson blood floated amid the clouds of smoke and twirling bits of metal like some surreal collage, and at the center of it were a collection of human bodies in torn, bloody and burned blue utility fatigues. She recognized Commander Prieta among them immediately, his dark eyes clouded and sightless. But one of them was still moving…

  Pushing off from the partially-open door, Minishimi caught the drifting crewmember and pulled the spare respirator over her face, wincing as she saw the raw, weeping burns that covered half of it. The woman---Chief Grieger she remembered---stirred and coughed violently as the oxygen hit her lungs, thrashing with pain and confusion.

  “Chief!” Minishimi shouted through her breath mask, trying to pin the woman’s arms. “It’s the Captain! Can you hear me?”

  “Ma’am!” Grieger calmed down, ceasing her struggling and looking into Minishimi’s eyes. “What…what happened?”

  “We had a catastrophic overload, Chief,” the Captain told her, yelling to make sure she understood. “Commander Prieta is dead. The ship is dead in space and we have rammers inbound---I’ve sent the crew to the lifepods, but if the ramships hit us, their fields will tear those lifepods apart. I need the plasma drive up and running to get them some room.”

  Grieger was probably in shock, physically and emotionally, but she was also a 20-year veteran NCO. Without another word, she pushed off from Minishimi toward controls set in the far wall on the other side of the ruined trunk line. The Captain waved her arms to steady herself as she floated back towards the ruined primary control boards, grabbing the edge of the display board to stop as she watched Grieger yank open the panel and pull down a heavy manual switch.

  The switch closed a circuit with a loud snap and the control panel’s displays that weren’t smashed flickered to life, along with the lighting still left intact. Grieger pushed away from the wall and went to the control panel, moving from one station to the next until she found one with working systems. He
r fingers flew across the display, and she paused as she evaluated the results, then turned to the Captain.

  “We’ve lost our antimatter fuel pods, ma’am…they all ejected automatically when the circuits blew. The reactor flushed, but I think I can get it up again with the emergency batteries if I can reroute from the blown power trunks.” She shook her head. “It’s going to take a few minutes though.”

  “Get it done,” she told the engineering NCO. “Then get to the lifepods and get off this ship. I’ll be on the bridge---contact me there when the reactor is up.”

  “What about you, ma’am?” Grieger asked, eyes frowning beneath her mask.

  “Don’t worry about me, Chief,” Minishimi assured her. “I’ll be off this boat just as quick as I can program the Helm to take the ship out of the area. I definitely want to live to fight another day.”

  Larry Gianeto looked up as the primary lighting flickered on in the hangar bay, followed quickly by the hum of the main ventilators. He turned to Commander Irvine, the Decatur’s flight officer, who had been directing his people into the bay’s half dozen life pods.

  “Commander!” he called. “Belay the lifepods! Get your people into the shuttles!”

  “Roger that!” Irvine nodded in understanding. Now that the power was back up, they could use the hangar’s launch locks, and the shuttles could keep them alive longer than the pods. They could also get farther away from the ship, making it less likely they would get caught in the drive fields of the…

  Gianeto’s head snapped around to the access tubes, and he made an instant decision. “Commander Irvine,” he called and the tall, lanky officer looked back. “Get as many shuttles as you can launched, and prepare to bring life pods on board once you’re out. I’m heading to the bridge.”

  Irvine said something, but Gianeto didn’t hear: he was already in the access tube and heading back the way he’d come.

  By the time Gianeto arrived at the bridge, Captain Minishimi was already there, leaning over the Helm station, frowning in concentration. She had, he noted, taken the time to move Francis Wiitten’s body, strapping it into the acceleration couch at the Communications station.

  “I figured I’d find you here, ma’am,” he said as he moved up behind her.

  “Mr. Gianeto,” the Captain said in a disapproving tone, glaring at him, “I recall giving you an order to abandon this ship.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said with a smile. “But when the power returned, I realized we had a chance to get the plasma drives online and move the ship away from the lifepods, give them some room so they have a better chance of surviving.” He shrugged. “I thought you might need some help programming the Helm.”

  “I appreciate the thought,” she said, voice gentler…then she sagged and sighed. “Unfortunately, we aren’t going to be able to do that.”

  “Ma’am?’ Gianeto asked, moving over to the station beside her.

  “The feedback from that field intersection did more than burn out our trunk lines,” the Captain explained. “We had a burn-through just aft of the bridge.” Gianeto winced. If an Eysselink field collapsed catastrophically, as theirs had, it could cause point failures at various spots in the field, which would burn back into the ship like a laser---an antimatter-powered laser fired at point-blank range. “It fried the ship’s navigational computer.” She waved a hand at the Helm display. “We have no helm controls from the bridge or even the auxiliary bridge. We’ll have to rig up something in the Engine room.”

  “But Captain,” Gianeto said slowly, realization creeping into his voice, “without the navigational computers, we’d have to maneuver the ship manually…”

  “I’m heading to Engineering, Commander Gianeto,” she said firmly, catching his eye with her no-nonsense look. “You are to get to the lifepods immediately and abandon ship. That’s an order.”

  “Ma’am,” he blurted, shaking his head, “let me do it. This war isn’t over…they’re going to need experienced captains.”

  Minishimi smiled sadly, laying a hand fondly on his shoulder. “Larry, I’d be a captain without a ship to run. This is my ship, and it’s my duty to carry out.” She jerked her head toward the door. “Get out now, or I’ll choke you out and drag you to the pods myself.”

  “Aye, ma’am.” He turned and headed for the door.

  “Tell my husband I was thinking about him,” she said softly. He nodded in reply, not trusting himself to say anything. He took one last look at her, then he was out the door and gone.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Shannon Stark stepped off the boarding ramp of the combat lander, the weight of her Marine-pattern combat armor feeling strangely constrictive across her chest, and moved to the side to allow the Special Operations troops behind her to scramble off. They reminded her of a coiled spring, unfolding into a defensive formation around the aerospacecraft, full of youth, energy and an ignorance of their own mortality.

  The turbines of the lander whined plaintively as they were throttled down, the waning blasts of superheated air from their vectored thrust nozzles tugging fitfully at the high grass in the clearing that had once been a shopping mall off the interstate in upstate New York. It was late afternoon, but the sun was already low in the sky: the days were getting shorter as autumn progressed.

  Here and there you could see the vestigial remains of the old buildings, where no one had bothered to tear them down, but most of the cleared ground was now landing zone for two dozen Colonial Guard heavy transports and staging areas for four times that many armored personnel carriers. Colonial Guard troops swarmed around the vehicles, pulling security and deploying the heavy weapons, while officers shouted orders…among them Ari Shamir and Roza Kovach.

  “Are we really counting on a bunch of just-graduated CeeGee officer candidates and a few training officers and NCOs to face down 20,000 biomechs?” Tom Crossman asked Shannon quietly, stepping up behind her with his helmet tucked under his arm.

  “They’re all we have, Tom,” she told him with a resigned shrug. “Ari thinks they can do it. Anyway, we’ll have support from the orbital weapons emplacements”

  “Uh-oh,” Tom whispered, “look busy, here comes the teacher.”

  Shannon concealed a grin as she looked over and saw General Kage striding purposefully toward their position, his natural bulk even more imposing in full CG body armor. His helmet was off, carried in his left hand, and he looked more at home than Shannon ever remembered.

  “My people will be deployed at the interstate junction within the hour,” he told Shannon, his voice businesslike but a frown darkening his face. “I still do not like this, Maj…Colonel Stark. By allowing the enemy to array against us, we give them time to prepare, to organize. We should have taken them at their staging area, before they had time to mount the vehicles.”

  “That would have been ideal, General,” she acknowledged, nodding, “except for the fact that their staging area was on the edges of the Montreal Metropolitan Complex and neither the President nor I wanted to be responsible for starting a major battle in a population center when we could avoid it.” She waved a hand around them. “No one lives out here and the only traffic is large cargo haulers. We take them here, in the open, away from innocent civilians.”

  “This doesn’t make any sense to me,” Tom muttered, looking up into the darkening sky. “Sure, he’s got a shitload of those blue-skinned fuckers to throw at us, but what’s the point of driving them cross-country in a fleet of APC’s? He’s just lining them up to be ducks in a shooting gallery.”

  “He is a man out of time,” Kage reminded them. “Perhaps he doesn’t realize the potential of orbital kinetic weapons to wreak havoc in an armored column.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t,” Shannon allowed, following Tom’s gaze to unseen weapons satellites, “but I’ll bet you Hellene D’Annique does.” She shook it off. “Still, they’re coming this way and we have to stop them.” She turned back to Tom. “Tell the lander pilots to take off and get into position.” He nod
ded and headed back up the ramp into their combat shuttle.

  Shannon reached into a pouch on her thigh and pulled out her tablet, calling up the view from the weapons satellites. “The enemy column is on the road,” she told Kage, turning the screen to let him see the video feed. “Let’s hope Antonov is as anachronistic as you believe.” Her eyes narrowed in a frown. “But somehow, I doubt it.”

  * * *

  Xavier Dominguez strode into the Orbital Weapons Control Center like he owned the place---which, as far as the young Fleet Lieutenant JG on duty was concerned, he did.

  “Mr. Vice President!” The duty officer shot to his feet as Dominguez and the half dozen men of his security detail walked through the front entrance. Not all VPs in Republic history would have been as instantly recognizable, but the handsome, charismatic politician had been a staple of the gossip reports for years. “Sir, I’m sorry we weren’t prepared for an inspection visit, but we had no notice…”

  “That’s quite all right, Lieutenant…” Dominguez peered at the man’s nametag in the dim lighting of the entrance hallway, still not automatically adjusted as the sun set outside its doors.

  “Barron, sir,” the young officer stammered, blushing slightly. “Lt. J.G. Louis Barron.”

  “It’s no problem, Louis,” Dominguez gave the officer his most sincere smile, patting him on the shoulder. “This is kind of a last minute thing. It’s the President’s idea, actually; I’m sure you’ve been kept abreast about the Protectorate attack this morning---tragedy, all those brave men and women at the Lunar base losing their lives.”