Duty, Honor, Planet: The Complete Trilogy

by Rick Partlow

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Vice President,” Barron said somberly. “We’re ready here, if those bastards try anything like they did five years ago!”

  “Well, see, Louis, that’s exactly why I’m here!” Dominguez clasped his hands together demonstratively. “I understand that there have been several changes in security since this base was overrun by the Protectorate during the invasion, and I’ve been sent to inspect things and make sure that nothing like that happens again.”

  “Well, um, sir,” Barron stuttered, glancing back and forth between Dominguez and the security door behind him, “I can, I guess, go over the changes with you…if Captain Prementer were here, he could…I mean, he’s the base commander, but he was on leave. I mean, he’s been recalled, obviously, with the attack, but he’s still in flight from Antarctica…”

  “That’s all right, son, I know you’ll do fine.”

  “Yes, sir, but the thing is,” Barron looked ready to fold into a ball and huddle in a corner, “technically, I need some sort of clearance from Fleet Headquarters to allow anyone not stationed here into the secure area of this base.”

  “I’ll do you one better, son,” Dominguez smiled ingratiatingly, pulling a tablet from a pocket of his designer jacket. He handed it to Barron and the younger man’s eyebrows went up. “That’s a Presidential authorization to enter any secure facility in the Republic. You can check it on your base mainframe, it can’t be forged.” And it wasn’t…but it had been given to him three years ago. He’d just made sure through the aid of some talented netdivers that it had never been rescinded.

  “Well, yes sir, Mr. Vice President,” Barron said with a relieved nod. “That should do fine then. If you’ll just follow me.” Barron nodded to one of the two armed guards stationed at the base entrance and the man fell in behind them as the officer presented his retina and palm for the biometric ID scanner. Two of the Vice Presidential security unit stayed in the entrance hall, while the others followed their charge into the bowels of the base.

  The thick blast doors slid aside, revealing a blank hallway that Dominguez already knew was lined with a half dozen automated weapons systems, lethal and nonlethal. Barron didn’t mention them, however, which Dominguez found interesting---perhaps the young man wasn’t as naïve as he seemed. Instead, the officer was droning on about the history of the invasion and how the Protectorate had been able to take control of both the ground-based defense lasers aimed outward and the kinetic kill satellites aimed downward.

  “To prevent such a thing happening again,” Barron went on, “changes have been made to the system that won’t allow anyone to shut out remote access to the defense network from here without a combination of three biometric access codes.”

  “So, it wouldn’t do the Protectorate any good to simply take this place over,” Dominguez summarized as they moved into the main control room. “That wouldn’t prevent us from using the orbital weapons systems. What if they just attacked this site from orbit, blew it up?”

  “There are backup uplinks at a few other locations that can communicate with the defense satellites,” Barron assured him, “and of course the ground-based lasers can be controlled on-site. The advantage of this place is that we centralize everything and provide targeting based on input from multiple sources. We’re also a fail-safe against someone hijacking the system from one of the other sites---every use has to be confirmed here and we can shut out remote use with the biometric access codes: the CO, the XO and a rotating code chosen at random and kept top secret.”

  “So, losing this place wouldn’t cripple our defense system,” Dominguez said, looking around, “and they can’t use it to shut out remote access either.” He nodded. “Good to know, good to know.” He pinned Barron with a glance. “And I assume the systems here are safe from outside computer attack as well.”

  “Yes, sir!” Barron told him, smiling with enthusiasm and obviously warmed up to his presentation. “The core systems here are totally isolated, not connected to any net. The only way to access them is through these stations, physically.” He waved a hand, indicating the stations against the far wall, where the technicians on duty were monitoring targeting data from sensor feeds out in the asteroid belt and Martian orbit.

  “Well, that’s just fine then,” Dominguez said, nodding slowly. He turned to the head of his security team and smiled. “I think we’ve heard enough.”

  Louis Barron turned back to the Vice President, ready to thank him for his visit, but the relief on his face turned to shock when he saw the wide-shouldered, hard-faced security agent aiming a suppressed handgun at him.

  “What…” was all he had the chance to say or think before the weapon fired. Its hoarse cough was the last thing he ever heard.

  * * *

  The sun was nothing but a faint glow on the western horizon as Shannon and Tom Crossman huddled behind a CeeGee armored vehicle, watching the feed from the combat lander on which they’d arrived as it hovered a few hundred meters above the enemy convoy. The vehicles were state of the art Republic Fleet Marine Corps APC’s, their dull grey coloring blending in nicely with the pavement, their insulated engines showing only a faint red even on thermal. And there were five hundred of them, packing the old interstate like an ancient traffic jam, rolling along at a steady 50 kilometers an hour, with another hundred corporate cargo haulers following them, each presumably carrying up to 50 biomech troopers as well as support equipment.

  “Jesus Christ, there’re a lot of them,” Tom muttered, shaking his head.

  “Target rich environment,” Shannon responded. Then she pushed the connection button on her ‘link’s ear bud. “Charlie Gulf Niner Niner, this is Charlie Gulf One. Your birds are cleared to fire.”

  “Roger, Charlie Gulf One,” the pilot responded. “We’re coming in for our first pass.”

  The view from the lander’s cameras shifted with roller-coaster abruptness as the combat craft banked hard out of its hover and swooped downward like a hawk after a rabbit. Smoke trails followed a fusillade of missiles that arced downward from the lander’s weapons bay and terminated on the trailing cargo haulers in the convoy, swallowing up three of them in a massive fireball. Then the aircraft was past the line of vehicles and angling around and the view shifted to the rear camera, showing the next lander coming in for a firing run…

  …and suddenly coming apart like a paper airplane as the cockpit and the entire front end of the aircraft disappeared in a haze of glowing vapor, the heat trail of the weapon that had destroyed it barely visible on thermal, climbing back along its trajectory, straight up into the twilight sky.

  Shannon’s eyes went wide and the roaring in her ears of the stunning realization nearly drowned out the panicked, redundant reports of the other pilots. “Get out of there!” she shouted desperately over their transmissions. “All aircraft evacuate the area and take evasive action! The enemy has orbital weapons!”

  As she spoke, Shannon pulled up the controls for the orbital defense system and was totally unsurprised when the tablet told her that she was not authorized to access that operation. She shoved the tablet at Tom, spitting out a curse.

  “General Kage!” she yelled into her ‘link. “Get your people away from the vehicles! Do it now!”

  In the background, Shannon could hear the screams on the communications channels as one after another of the assault shuttles went down, reduced to burning fragments by remotely-steered tungsten darts barely two meters long, dropped from orbit. She fought back bile that rose in her throat, realizing that not only did each strike kill three good men and women, but that each one meant another second gone before those orbital weapons were retargeted…

  “What is happening, Colonel Stark?” Kage demanded, his deep voice sounding small and distant in her ear. She knew he was less than a kilometer away from her position, farther down the old interstate. “What are you talking about?”

  “The orbital defense network is compromised!” she told him quickly. “The landers are being destroyed by kin
etic weapons! Once they’re gone, those weapons will target our vehicles…you have to get everyone away from the APCs!”

  Behind her, she could already hear Tom yelling at the Special Ops team to move away from the vehicles and take cover in the tall grass and she began moving that direction herself in a quick jog as she spoke with Kage. “General, did you read me?”

  There was no answer, and she was in the process of calling Ari when a CeeGee armored vehicle only a hundred meters away exploded. Shannon stumbled at a concussion that she could feel in her chest and a quaking in the earth from the 50 kilogram tungsten rod hitting the ground at around Mach 10, but she managed to keep her feet long enough to reach Tom’s position out in the middle of the field. She sprawled next to him, pulling on her helmet and securing it as she continued to try to call Ari.

  “Ari, get them away from the APCs!” She switched to her helmet radio.

  But the only reply she received was the endless roll of thunder as one after another of the armored vehicles was destroyed in a hideous overkill of liberated kinetic energy raining down from the sky like the wrath of an angry god.

  Chapter Forty

  Drew Franks grunted with a primal satisfaction as the Protectorate ramship vaporized in a cloud of plasma, its fuel stores ruptured by a fusillade of tungsten Gauss cannon rounds.

  “Cease fire, reactivate drive field,” acting Captain Lee ordered.

  “That’s four of them down,” Lt. Wolford reported, checking the sensor display. “Plus the two the Decatur took out.” He looked back at her from his station. “She’s still drifting, ma’am…and there are two ramships left this side of the wormhole, heading straight for her.”

  “Shit,” Franks muttered, earning a dirty look from Lee.

  “Can we reach them before they get to her?” Lee asked, looking back and forth between Wolford and Bevins. They looked at each other, then checked their displays and fed data to each other’s station before turning back to her.

  “No chance, ma’am,” Bevins said, shaking his head. “The first rammer is less than fifteen minute away now. It would take us a half hour to get there at the maximum acceleration we could stand outside the tanks”

  “She’s launching shuttles and lifepods,” Wolford put in. “They’re abandoning ship.”

  “Set an intercept course for the ramships,” Lee said. “We can’t save the Decatur, but we’ll clean up those two bogies, then swing back and pick up the survivors.”

  “They won’t be able to clear the ramship’s drive field,” Franks pointed out, his voice dull, trying to force down the rage he was feeling. “They’ll get ripped apart.”

  “And what would you suggest I do about that, Lt. Franks?” Lee asked tautly but quietly, her dark eyes flaring with anger.

  Franks didn’t answer her immediately, biting back the angry retort that rose in his throat like bile. Commander Lee felt just as angry and impotent as he did, he realized, and had absolutely no combat experience. “I don’t know what we can do, ma’am,” he finally said, “or what we could have done differently. That’s what gets me: I know there should have been, and I can’t help but think that if Major Stark or Colonel McKay were here, they would have done things better than I have.”

  Lee’s expression softened and she chuckled humorlessly. “Hell, Lieutenant, you think I’m not wishing Captain Perez were sitting in this seat? Or Admiral Patel? This is not how I saw myself getting my first command. But as of a few minutes from now, we’re going to be all that’s left between the Protectorate and Earth, like it or not.”

  “She’s moving!” Wolford blurted, leaning closer to the holographic display as if he didn’t believe it. “Her fusion drives are up…she’s moving away at two g’s!”

  “She’s getting farther from the shuttles and lifepods,” Franks deduced.

  “Get us in there, Bevins,” Lee snapped. “Two g’s acceleration, we have to take out those ramships before they reach the survivors!”

  “Aye, ma’am, sounding acceleration alarms, prepare for high-g burn!”

  Franks tightened his harness and leaned back into his couch just as the Helm officer fed power to the drives and space-time spat the ship out like a watermelon seed. On the main viewscreen, the ship seemed to jump forward, the stars streaking by around them, but Franks’ eyes were glued to the representation of the Decatur, which was still accelerating as well, a flare of fusion fire behind her drive bell. The lead ramship was bearing down on her, though, not moving terribly fast for an Eysselink drive ship but still outpacing the crippled Republic warship.

  Someone---probably Wolford---put up a projection of the reach of the ramship’s drive field and a line showing how far away it would have to be for the shuttles and lifepods to survive. It seemed like the Decatur was crawling away from the tiny green symbols that represented her shuttles, the blue tinged circle of the ramship’s drive field still on course to rip those green symbols apart.

  “Why only two g’s?” Franks wondered aloud, pushing the words out past twice his normal weight on his chest.

  “What?” Lee asked, eyes flickering over to him.

  “The Decatur,” he clarified. “Why is she only hitting two g’s? They can’t be saving fuel---saving it for what? For a short run like that, the fusion drive could hit four g’s easy, get them out of the area faster. Why only two g’s?”

  There was silence on the bridge for a moment as his question sank in, and then Bevins broke it, with a grim statement. “There are still people on board,” he said. “Someone’s running her manually.”

  “Jesus,” Wolford hissed.

  “Enough chatter,” Lee snapped, trying to sound tough, but Franks could see the pain in her eyes, hear the catch in her throat. “Just take us to that intercept.”

  On the screen, the blue halo moved almost imperceptibly away from the shuttles. Franks watched it, wishing he could somehow make it disappear…

  “What’s the range on the sensors?” He asked suddenly. Wolford looked at him blankly. “The modified sensor beams we used to destabilize their drive fields…it’s gotta’ have a longer range than conventional beam weapons. It’s travelling FTL for Christ’s sake!”

  A light came on in Wolford’s eyes and he hit the intercom control. “Commander Infante!” he nearly shouted into the audio pickup. “What’s the effective range of the sensor mods to destabilize an Eysselink field?”

  There was a long silence and for a moment, Franks thought that Infante hadn’t heard the transmission, but then the Engineer replied, her voice slow and hesitant. “I can’t say for sure, Lt. Wolford,” she said. “It depends on the strength and size of the field you’re targeting and…”

  “Give me your best Goddamned guess, Commander!” Lee interjected with an impatient snarl.

  “Perhaps…100,000 kilometers at the power levels we’re using,” the Engineer estimated, a bit of pique in her voice at Lee’s tone.

  Franks glanced to Lee and she shot him a fierce grin. “The hell with McKay and Stark, Lieutenant,” she said. “You’re doing all right yourself.” She turned to Bevins and Wolford. “Tactical, I need a firing solution for that ramship! Range is 100,000 kilometers! Helm, get us there in time!”

  * * *

  Larry Gianeto squeezed through the lifepod hatch and the narrow docking umbilical, into the pressurized cockpit of the shuttle. The cabin was crowded with a dozen crewmembers, two more than it was supposed to be able to hold safely, and two dozen more were crammed into the lifepods in its unpressurized cargo hold. Larry moved through the press, coming up to the back of the pilot’s seat.

  “Commander Irvine,” he spoke loudly to be heard over the hubbub in the crowded cockpit. “Do we have all the lifepods secured in the shuttles?”

  Irvine turned back to him, sweat beading on his dark-skinned, hawk-lean face from the heat of the massed bodies in the small cabin. “They’re just closing the cargo bay doors on the last one, Commander Gianeto,” he reported, strain in his voice. “The Decatur is under way…sh
e activated her fusion drive about a minute ago.”

  “I want every shuttle in a full-power burn in the opposite direction now,” Gianeto ordered. Irvine glanced at him dubiously, not least because they were both the same rank, but then nodded and turned to relay the order.

  “Everyone strap in!” Irvine yelled back into the cabin. “One g burn in ten seconds!”

  Gianeto glanced around, heartbeat quickening as he saw that every acceleration couch was occupied, but then Irvine’s co-pilot jerked a thumb back to a fold-down seat next to the airlock. Gianeto scrambled back to pull it down into position and barely managed to get the harness around him before the shuttle’s engines flared to life. He was pushed back into his seat by a familiar 80 kilograms as the shuttle’s small, onboard particle-bed reactor heated up the liquid hydrogen reaction mass and expelled it at hypersonic velocities.

  Gianeto felt his heart rate increasing and fought to stay calm. There were dozens of crewmembers in the shuttles, and yet his attention kept drifting back to the Decatur and Captain Minishimi, now just a distant star of fusion light on the viewers.

  “Which lifepod is the Captain on?” Irvine asked him, as if reading his expression.

  “She’s not in a lifepod,” Gianeto told the pilot. “The navigation computers were fried by the feedback from the field collision. Captain Minishimi is in the Engineering bay of the Decatur, piloting her manually.”

  Irvine’s head snapped around, his mouth dropping open and he wasn’t the only one. It seemed to Gianeto that everyone in the cabin was staring at him aghast. A sour taste was in his mouth and he felt like a coward. “I tried to make her let me do it,” he said, shaking his head. “She said it was her duty as Captain.” He felt a surge of anger and put it in his voice. “She ordered me to look after the crew and that’s exactly what I intend to do.”

  Irvine nodded, acceptance reluctantly entering his eyes. He paused, closing his eyes and whispering a prayer under his breath, then crossed himself; Gianeto saw a few others join him. He wasn’t Catholic, or much of anything, but for a moment he wished he were: right now, it would be very comforting to believe in an afterlife.