Duty, Honor, Planet: The Complete Trilogy

by Rick Partlow

  “Is it bad?” McKay asked, feeling a jolt of sympathy for the man. What had happened under his watch wasn’t his fault and hadn’t been foreseeable, but that wouldn’t stop him from being blamed for it.

  “I’m considering resigning the Presidency,” O’Keefe admitted, not meeting the other man’s eyes.

  “I never thought you’d give up without a fight, sir,” McKay said, shaking his head.

  “I’ve had a lot of fights, Jason,” he replied, downing the last of his Scotch in one gulp. “My fights got my wife killed, they got Glen killed, and they almost got my daughter and granddaughter killed…would have, if it weren’t for you. This job…” He shook his head. “This job just isn’t worth it.”

  “Dominguez is dead,” McKay pointed out. “There would have to be a special election.”

  “And I believe I know who will win that election,” O’Keefe touched a control on his desk and brought up another news report, this one showing the serious, heroic face of Gregory Jameson. “The press is really running with the story about him taking down Antonov.”

  “No mention of Riordan or his role in all this, though,” McKay noted. “Whose doing is that?”

  O’Keefe shrugged. “I was convinced by my advisors that it would do more harm than good to go after him. There are too many things we don’t want made public that would get out.”

  “Sir, I understand why you’re doing what you’re doing, but I think you’re bowing out too early. There’s another layer to this onion. There’s just too much we don’t know yet.”

  “That’ll be your job, Jason,” O’Keefe poured himself another glass and topped off McKay’s. They both picked up their drinks and O’Keefe raised his in a toast. “May you find the answers to all your mysteries.” They each took a sip and O’Keefe set his glass down with a sigh. “And may you have fewer regrets than I have.”

  “We all have regrets, sir,” McKay said thoughtfully. He took another drink. “For one, I regret ever getting D’mitry Podbyrin involved in all this. He was happy where he was, and I got him killed.”

  “He didn’t make it off the Sheridan?”

  McKay shook his head. “We’ve accounted for all the survivors. It was a bit difficult, since the ship’s power surges were ejecting lifepods unoccupied and some of them reentered automatically, but there’s been no sign of him. He probably died when the ship’s fields intersected.”

  “Then here’s to Colonel D’mitry Podbyrin.” O’Keefe raised his glass again. “He died doing the right thing.”

  * * *

  Colonel D’mitry Grigor’yevich Podbyrin sat quietly in a dark corner of the bar, half-watching the NewsNet broadcast of the awards ceremony in Reagan Plaza and half listening to the scattered murmurings from customers nursing their drinks.

  It was so strange to hear Russian once again. He hadn’t been back to Earth since the War, but he would have thought it a dead language now: and it was, except for a few places. It so happened that Alaska was one of those places. Many Russian immigrants who had fled the Rodina during or after the War had settled here, and every city had a large minority population of Russian-speaking citizens.

  It was fortuitous that his lifepod had landed on the bare tundra, and even more fortuitous that the first people he had come across after two days of wandering through the wilderness were Russian immigrants. Or perhaps it was fate…

  Either way, Fairbanks was much more homelike than Loki had been.

  Podbyrin saw the man approaching his booth and slid aside to give him room. Yuri was an older man, his face weathered and strong and his eyes as blue and cold as the Arctic sea.

  “I have contacted our friends,” Yuri told him quietly. “They have sunk the lifepod in the ocean. There will be nothing to connect any of us to it, and they will never know you were on it.”

  “I thank you for your help,” Podbyrin said earnestly. “I truly did not wish to return to exile. But I wonder…you do not do this just because I am Russian?”

  “There are few enough of us left,” Yuri said, grinning frostily, “that we help whoever needs it. But yes, there is a special interest in you, particularly among the bratva.”

  Podbyrin felt a chill run down his neck. Bratva…the brotherhood: it was a term used for various families in the Russian mafia back in his day. Apparently, the language wasn’t the only thing that had survived the War here.

  “And why would they be interested in me?” he wanted to know. Or perhaps he didn’t, he wasn’t really certain.

  “We are interested in certain information you might have,” Yuri said. Ah. “We” are interested, Podbyrin noted. That settled what Yuri’s stake in this was.

  “Any information I have,” D’mitry Podbyrin pointed out, “the Republic military already has. They questioned me chemically and quite thoroughly.”

  “Tovarisch,” Yuri assured him, patting him on the shoulder in friendly fashion, “there are things that you know that you don’t even know you know. Things that could be very useful to the General.”

  “The General is dead,” Podbyrin said, taking a gulp of his drink to stave off a feeling that the room was closing in on him.

  “No, my brother,” Yuri said, the look in his eyes utterly terrifying. “The General lives.”

  Duty, Honor, Planet 3:

  The Line of Duty

  by Rick Partlow

  Copyright 2013 by Rick Partlow

  To my wife Elizabeth, for never giving up and never letting me give up either.

  To Robert Heinlein, for getting an 8 year old hooked on science fiction. I've read "Have Space Suit---Will Travel" hundreds of times, but that first time was magic.

  “It is better to do one’s own duty, however defective it may be, than to follow the duty of another, however well one may perform it. He who does his duty, as his own nature reveals it, never sins.”---Lao Tzu

  “When the will defies fear, when duty throws the gauntlet down to fate, when honor scorns to compromise with death - that is heroism.”--- Robert Green Ingersoll

  Prologue:

  Angela Pirelli squeezed her eyes shut against flashes of colors she shouldn't have been able to see, shaking her head to clear it from the existential debris of a transition through one of the jumpgates. The side-effects of the wormhole passage were short-lived but maddening: she could taste sounds and feel the texture of spacetime and a dozen other things that were utterly impossible, yet happened every time a human mind was subject to the other-ness of the gates.

  She opened her eyes and saw reality settling in around her as viewscreens and holographic projections flickered back to life and the men and women of her bridge crew went back to work. The front bulkhead of the bridge was cloaked in a holographic projection that combined the ship's external cameras, her lidar and radar systems and the gravimetic scanners along with computer simulation to show a very lifelike 360 degree picture of the Eysselink field generators that kept the wormhole open at the expense of a minute but steady trickle of antimatter. In the distance, barely discernible as the works of man, were massive particle accelerators powered by kilometers-wide solar collectors, producing the antimatter needed to maintain the Eysselink effect.

  The local primary burned a fierce blue-white in the distance, while the lone habitable wasn’t visible at all from where they’d entered the system, though the computer very graciously provided a glowing green halo around the distant point of light. The only planet visible with the naked camera lens was a smallish gas giant that glowed a dull white off their portside, its captured-asteroid moons tracing their orbits across its sullen face.

  "Good transition, Captain," the Helm officer announced, his hands manipulating the holographic icons projected at his station. "We're getting a solid position read from the Kali beacon..."

  He was suddenly interrupted, first by the insistent and urgent tone of an alarm that accompanied a glowing red halo on the Tactical display, and then by the equally urgent voice of the Communications officer.

  "Captain Pi
relli," the young Lieutenant blurted, twisting around at his station to look back at her, "I'm getting a distress signal from the oil tanker Yodohashi---she’s about thirty thousand kilometers out, heading this way from the B jumpgate and she’s under attack by a lone raider.”

  “Put it through, Lt. Baker,” she instructed him, trying to remain calm.

  “Tactical,” Pirelli went on, “bring us to battle stations, arm all weapons systems.”

  “Battle stations aye, Captain,” Lt. Commander Milankovic confirmed.

  “I have Captain Mori, ma’am,” Baker announced.

  A hologram coalesced over the left arm of her command chair, showing her the head and shoulders of a slender Japanese man, his head shaved but for a close-cropped Mohawk, intricate tattoos that swirled mesmerizingly on the scalp to either side marking him as someone raised in the mining communities in the Solar asteroid belt.

  “This is Captain Pirelli of the Colonial Patrol cutter Triton,” she told him. “What’s your situation?”

  “Captain,” he began quickly, his accent confirming her observation about his Belter origins, “we picked up a shadow just after we transited the B gate. He’s been accelerating at three g’s and he just sent us a pre-recorded voice-only message demanding we cut power and prepare to accept boarders.”

  Mori grinned ruefully. “We have a grand total of four crew on board and our most potent weapon is a sawed-off shotgun. We’re pretty deep inside this rust-bucket,” Pirelli snuck a quick glance at the Tactical display and saw that the tanker was a huge ship with massive oil containers surrounding and shielding the bridge, “but if he frags our engines, we’re pretty much helpless to keep him off us.” He shook his head. “We saw you coming through the A gate and we were wondering if you weren’t busy…”

  Pirelli nodded curtly. “Show me the sensor feed from your ship,” she told the man.

  His image was replaced by the bulbous, misshapen lines of a class of ship she knew far too well. It had started out life as one of the general purpose transports that were so ubiquitous in the Republic and were just as ubiquitously pirated. It had been extensively modified, as they usually were: jury-rigged armor plating was welded over every external surface and most heavily over the extra fuel tanks that ringed the engine bell and the weapons pods that flanked the cargo hold. Another pair of large protuberances were mounted above the fuel tanks; Pirelli couldn’t identify their purpose, but she thought they might be more weapons or possibly sensors.

  Even as she watched, one of the pods mounted by the ship’s cargo hold spat out a missile, shunting it free of the ship via a jet of inert coldgas before the weapon’s solid-fuel rocket ignited and it blurred into motion. Pirelli felt a cold hollow in the pit of her stomach as the Yodohashi’s computer showed a simulation of the tanker and tracked the missile’s trajectory towards it.

  “Oh shit!” She could hear Mori’s exclamation over the connection as the missile grew closer to his ship. “That’s not heading for the engines…”

  “They’re hitting the cargo,” Pirelli declared flatly, frowning in consternation. It made no sense, but it had been happening over and over. “Tactical, launch an interceptor.”

  “Interceptor is loaded on the launch rack,” Milankovic told her as his fingers traced a line through the holographic display from the computer avatar for their patrol cutter to the glowing red of the raider. “Bogie is targeted.” He grabbed a phantom control in the display, the haptic feedback giving it substance, and yanked. “One interceptor is away.”

  On the screen she could see the missile jetting away from the Triton behind a flare of solid-fueled fission fire, slicing through the kilometers at 20 gravities. “Helm, intercept course, two gravities acceleration,” Pirelli ordered.

  “Two gravities aye, ma’am,” Lt. Commander Burckhardt acknowledged. On the Tactical simulation, she could see the drive pods that encircled the aft of their wedge shaped starship glowing blue with Cherenkov radiation as the Eysselink field surrounded them.

  Alarms sounded both on the external speakers and the crew’s ear buds and then a suffocating weight pressed down on Pirelli’s chest as the Eysselink drive contracted the fabric of spacetime in front of the ship and expanded it behind them in what her old physics professors at the Fleet Academy had described as a “boat propeller effect.”

  They’d also explained to her that, although the drive was reactionless and should have been free of the inertia of conventional acceleration, it built up a charge in the gravito-inertial spectrum in another dimension that expressed itself in ours as an analog to the acceleration forces of a conventional engine. She’d never quite understood that part…and at times like these, she truly didn’t appreciate it.

  “Time till we’re in range for the lasers?” She forced the question out past gritted teeth. The only good thing you could say about two g’s was that it wasn’t as bad as three g’s.

  “Less than ten minutes, Captain,” Milankovic replied, his voice infuriatingly casual. “Assuming the bogie keeps up her present acceleration.”

  She filed that bit of information away carefully. She didn’t want to use Gauss guns against the raider this close to the shipping lanes between gates: those projectiles just kept going mindlessly if they didn’t hit their target, and she didn’t need to be killing some innocent freighter crew with a stray shot. She could just destroy the raider with missiles, but…

  “If the interceptor takes out her engines,” Pirelli told her Tactical officer, “use the lasers to disable her weapons pods. We need to take them alive.”

  “Their missile is about to hit,” Milankovic told her, nodding at the Tactical screen.

  The raider weapon closed swiftly with the cargo vessel, ignoring the massive fusion drives that propelled the craft and the fuel tanks that fed them deuterium and instead heading for the three hundred meter long cylinders that held the ship’s payload---millions of metric tons of crude oil pumped from the abundant fields of Inferno, heading to Earth’s orbital chemical plants to serve as raw material for polymer fabricators and a hundred other crucial functions in the interstellar economy.

  “Why are they bothering?” Milankovic wondered aloud. “So what if they blow a hole in the tanks? The oil will still be out there and the tanker crew can probably get most if it back…”

  Then the missile struck and the portside tank was swallowed in a huge, sun-bright sphere of pure white hell.

  “Blood of the Prophet!” Milankovic swore, rocking back in shock, his long face paling. “They nuked it!”

  “Jesus,” Pirelli hissed under her breath as the explosion reached the tanker’s fuel storage pods and the chain reaction expanded to include all the deuterium they held…

  The whole viewscreen went white and she thought for a quick, irrational moment that the blast had damaged the Triton, even though she knew that was impossible. But then the whiteness shrank and she could see that the massive fusion blast had simply filled the projection’s field of view for a moment before it compensated. The tanker Yodohashi was gone, most of it converted very violently to energy, what was left spinning away with the random trajectories imparted by the blast.

  Pirelli’s stomach twisted…Mori and the rest of his crew were dead, just like that. “Tactical,” she rasped, trying to clear her throat. “Time to impact for our interceptor?”

  “Bogie has cut his acceleration to one gravity,” Milankovic told her. “He’s changing course…I think he’s making a run for the C gate.” He traced a pattern in his control hologram. “Adjusted estimated intercept by our missile is five minutes.”

  “Helm, keep on him,” Pirelli told Burckhardt. “Cut him off from that gate.” She turned to the Communications officer. “Send the gate an emergency override signal, shut it down, just in case the missile doesn’t get him.”

  “Sending override,” Baker confirmed. “It’ll take a couple minutes to get a response from the gate AI at this distance.”

  “Why the hell would they do that?” Milankovic
muttered, half to himself, as he watched the progress of their interceptor missile on his display. “That didn’t make any sense at all. They had to have seen us coming before they launched. They should have just run…”

  “And why would they waste a fusion warhead on a damned oil tanker?” Burckhardt piped up. “Something like that has gotta’ cost a fortune on the black market.”

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Pirelli interrupted firmly, “I fully intend to pose those questions to the only ones around who can answer them. So let’s concentrate on disabling their ship and making sure we bring each and every one of them to justice, shall we?”

  A chorus of abashed “Aye, ma’am” and “Aye Captain” answered and the bridge crew went back to their tasks.

  “Our interceptor is thirty seconds out,” Milankovic said, watching the display carefully. The missile was simulated realistically there, a wedge-shaped tungsten warhead with 200 kilos of hyperexplosives behind it, streaking ever closer to the fleeing raider.

  Pirelli tapped a code into her ‘link and heard the tone that indicated an answer. “Security,” she heard a female voice on the line. “Lt. Brandt here, ma’am.”

  “Lieutenant,” she said, “once we secure from high-g acceleration, get your Marines ready for a boarding action. My intent is to disable the raider and take its crew prisoner.”

  “Aye, ma’am,” Brandt acknowledged. “We’re prepped already.”

  “Ten seconds to impact,” Milankovic droned. He sounded professional, but Pirelli thought she could see anticipation in the set of his eyes. Well, she was pretty set on payback herself. She fought back a feral grin as she waited for the announcement that the raider’s engines had been taken out. And then… “What the hell?”