“I agree,” Paul got up to unlock the door so Kinsey could stop pretending to examine a nearby terminal. He stopped halfway there and turned to Urbica. “Colonel, are you planning to be anywhere that I could get a signal to home-world? I need to pass on what we’ve learned so far.”
“No problem. There should still be enough repeaters around Trochu. They can amplify your signal and get it to a gate.”
Paul opened the door and dropped into a seat.
They had to wait at least a minute before Kinsey decided it would look like he was entering the room on his own timetable. The man walked in without a word and headed for the carafe.
“Romanus,” Urbica greeted him casually. “I see the orbitals are secure. I’m sure the rebels will think twice before taking on a super-dreadnaught.”
If Kinsey realized he was being called a coward, he showed no sign. “Colonel Urbica, I called you in for orders, not to steal my coffee.”
“I’m busy, Romanus,” she chided. “Surely you could arrange affairs here without having to seek my orders for every little thing.”
Kinsey made an obvious effort to control his anger. “Don’t push your luck,” he warned. “I called you here because we need to put an end to these secessionists, once and for all.”
She looked at him as though regarding a mildly amusing child. “You have a plan, do you?”
“I do,” he insisted in clipped tones. “You will draw your forces in, concentrate them here around Irricana and, when the rebels come, we’ll crush them.”
Urbica stared at him for a few seconds, then frowned over at Paul. Her look was clear enough to Paul. Kinsey was initiating the incident.
She managed to cover it by pointing out the obvious flaw in the plan. “I doubt the secessionists would be so obligingly stupid, Romanus. They specialize in asymmetrical warfare; why would they develop a sudden interest in high-intensity combat against superior forces?”
“Because this is their only source of supplies now that…” Kinsey trailed off when he realized where he was headed.
Urbica smiled. “I conceed the point, Romanus. Driving off the raiders has limited the rebel’s options, but I doubt they’d be desperate enough to commit suicide in front of our guns.”
She started toward the door. “I’m taking the dragoons out to the Trochu system,” she told him. “There are a lot of repeaters out that way that they haven’t hit yet. We should be able to bag a few secessionists, if we’re patient.”
“I’ll be making a note of this insubordination.” Kinsey threw the warning at her back.
Urbica stopped, turning to face him. She kept staring, black rimmed eyes boring into him until he looked away. “Have the master-at-arms write it up, Romanus. It’s a conflict of interest to report your own disobedience.”
She gave him a wolfish grin. “Or are you planning to officially claim that poor old Crispin wanted you to take charge if he should ever happen to shoot himself in the back? That might raise questions, might even cause the ‘Eye’ to drop out for a visit.”
She turned and led her officers out of the room.
“Well, they’re giving me a ride so…” Paul heaved himself out of the seat and walked out past the enraged colonel. Seconds later, he slipped back in and grabbed the carafe. “For the road,” he told the incredulous Kinsey. And then he left without another word.
Dragooning
Paul opened his eyes. The ceiling seemed wrong somehow. It looked like the same modular panels used on passenger liners but several of the filthy panels were either broken or entirely missing. On a commercial liner, they would have been replaced immediately. The passengers were more at ease when they weren’t constantly looking at conduits and cable trays. They liked to forget they were on a fragile ship in the void of space.
He swung his legs over the edge of the slightly dusty bed and sat up, looking around at the grimy, dated decor of the stateroom. It was the smell that helped his brain to catch up with his senses. He remembered the faint musty odor from several hours ago. The ship’s atmospheric scrubbers were being cleaned rather than replaced and they were being shoved back into their ducts while still wet. It was the kind of jury-rigged solution you tended to see out on the Rim where parts were hard to come by. The sort of thing you’d expect from dragoons trying to keep an old passenger liner running.
He was aboard Urbica’s ship.
The Rope a Dope was a former passenger liner, dilapidated by civilian standards, but luxurious to military personnel. It’s new name was a backhanded comment on her role, or at least that had been the gist of Urbica’s cryptic explanation.
He glanced at the door to the washroom but decided on food and caffeine before hygiene. He opened the door to the passageway and started in mild surprise to find an armed guard facing him from across the hall. The man was wearing the lighter-weight combat EVA suit common to the sector defense forces and he had 1GD stenciled on the shoulders.
“The colonel wanted me to bring you up to the bridge,” he said with a grin, “after you’d had your ‘beauty sleep’.”
“Mind if we swing by a mess deck and pick up something along the way?”
“No need, sir.” The man gestured to his left. “There’s usually something laid on in the ready room so the bridge staff can rotate through a meal more quickly. We’re operating this beast with less than two full shifts.”
Paul fell in beside the guard as they headed aft. At the first big intersection they turned inboard and the narrow passageway gradually widened onto a large open area. They descended a grand, curving staircase and made their way through the lounge that sat at the bottom of a twelve-story atrium.
Close to two hundred members of 1GD were in the lounge, talking, playing dice or simply listening to the music provided by a trio of amateur musicians.
Paul amended that assessment as they approached a bank of elevators. The three sounded good. It was a bouncy little folk tune; the guitar, drum and harp-cordion playing off each other with practiced ease.
He wondered if they had been a group that volunteered for the SDF together. A chime sounded from the address system as he passed the bar, and everybody dropped what they were doing and headed up the stairs.
Paul and his guard walked into an elevator and rode up to the command deck. Immediately outside the elevator door was a guard station. The modular scanner was an obvious addition and it looked out of place amid the lurid pastel carpet and wall coverings.
As they rounded the corner to the bridge, Paul noticed Urbica through the glazed wall of a boardroom. He assumed, from the mug in her hand that it must be the ready room where food was, hopefully, located.
He caught a hint of a smile from her again and he thought he had a good idea why. This class of ship had recently been retired from service in the Pulsar Line but Paul had seen one during an owners’ tour.
There were a few peculiarities in the White Dwarf class and one of them was the difficulty in locating doors. Anywhere the ship had a glass wall with a built-in door, the door simply looked like another pane of glass.
Urbica and the two other officers in the room with her were waiting for him to start pawing at the glass like an idiot. Paul smiled to himself as he stepped up to the door panel and reached out to touch the panels on either side. It was an unpopular design among stewards, who rarely had two hands free.
The door slid up into the ceiling and he walked in. “Good morning, Colonel,” he greeted her with a polite smile and headed for the food at the back end of the boardroom table. He tried not to look smug as he caught the other two officers exchange looks of surprise.
“Your quarters are to your liking?” she inquired.
“I’ve had worsh,” Paul mumbled around a mouthful of an unidentifiable purple fruit. He nodded his thanks to a lieutenant who handed him a mug of coffee, and forced himself to wait until he’d finished chewing this time. “What was that alarm I just heard?”
Another smile, but this time it was just a crinkling of amusement aroun
d the eyes. “The Rope a Dope is about to live up to her name. We picked up some suspicious activity near a repeater junction.”
Paul swallowed. “We’re going after them?”
“That would spoil the illusion,” she told him. “We’re just a helpless private charter, carrying passengers to Trochu. They’ll want to board us and slap us around a bit so we’ll scream to home-world about how dangerous it’s getting out here.”
“And we want to be boarded?”
“Oh, we do,” she replied emphatically. “We could sure do with a good boarding, couldn’t we fellas?”
The two dragoons chuckled. “I haven’t been boarded in months,” a dragoon captain declared. “Those three little Khlen-class ships will make us heave to, and then they’ll sweep us into a close embrace in order to swamp us with boarders.”
“And they’ll get what someone in a close embrace typically gets…” Urbica’s lips curled up at the corners in a wolfish smile. She set her mug down. “Grab something that won’t leave crumbs all over the bridge and let’s go put on a show.”
Paul selected an egg-filled roll and followed the officers out to the bridge. It was surreal, seeing the lightly armored dragoons with their shaved heads sitting at civilian terminals. The carpeted floor and enclosed ceiling further enhanced the contrast. In the large, open central space a portable CIC suite had been erected. The holo screens showed three approaching raiders.
“I’d say it’s just about the point where some half-drunk, has-been bridge officer might actually notice them,” Julia announced. “Helm, give us a couple of course changes, then go to all-ahead-full.”
“Aye, ma’am,” the helmsman replied. “One ‘Panicky-Pete’ coming up.”
The stars began to shift back and forth for a few seconds.
“They’ve gone to full speed,” Urbica announced. “They should be…”
“Unidentified vessel,” a harsh voice emitted from the overhead speakers, “heave-to and prepare to be boarded or you will be fired upon.”
“Reduce thrust,” Urbica ordered. “Give us a couple more course changes.”
A streak flashed past the windows.
“That was pretty close,” Urbica said cheerfully. “We don’t want to look too brave or they’ll get suspicious. Full stop. Secure the reactor.”
“Full stop, aye.”
“Operations,” she called across the bridge, “get ready to move the starboard teams, it looks like both incursions will come in on the port side.”
“Both?” Paul had finished his breakfast and he came to stand near Urbica. He took a sip of coffee. “I thought we had three inbounds.”
“You’ve never done a boarding operation?” She spared him a quick glance. “They’ll want to keep one ship ready to fire on us while the other two carry out the boarding. That way they can give us a face-full of depleted-uranium if things start to go sideways.”
“We have a cunning plan to deal with that, right?” Paul looked out the window as a hull appeared above them.
She nodded. “All this plan is missing is a tail and you could call it a weasel. To begin with, they’re assuming the show-bridge is where we’ll be. It’s the most prominent from the outside, so they can fire all day and have no effect on our ability to fight.”
The show-bridge was where passengers were allowed to sit behind dummy consoles and believe they were on the real bridge. They could push buttons and distract the crew all they wanted without driving the company’s insurance through the roof.
The main display holo showed two streams of red heat signatures entering the ship on the port side. They began leapfrogging their way in toward the center of the Rope a Dope.
She nodded, her hand reaching halfway to her ear. “Acknowledged. All units, this is Colonel Urbica. Execute. Execute. Execute.”
Paul watched the holo as the invading red heat signatures converged in the main lounge and green signatures moved forward, lining the railings above them.
A distant rattle of automatic weapons fire signaled the beginning of the uneven fight. On the screen, white lines lanced out from each dragoon as they cut down the invaders. It looked as though the boarders’ vessels might be completely empty. The boarding parties numbered close to fifty men in total.
The Khlen class ships, built for the export market by the Grays, could carry thirty troops if they weren’t in armor, twenty if armored. If the crews joined the boarding parties, they might be able to put twenty-five armored fighters aboard the ship from each of the two Khlens.
Urbica had thousands of dragoons aboard the Rope a Dope and they’d known the most likely place for an armed band to effectively subdue a ship filled with civilians would be the central lounge. It was where they would be most visible with their intimidating armor and weapons.
Some of the dragoons had doubtless lived through just such an attack in their civilian past.
Life on the Rim was hard.
“All units, this is Colonel Urbica. Phase two. Phase two. Phase two.”
Two knots of green signatures poured out of side passageways and up the main corridors to the two open airlocks. They flowed aboard the two vessels in single file.
It was accomplished in seconds. Both docked ships were empty, their crews caught in an ambush at the lounge Paul had walked through moments earlier.
“All units, Urbica. Phase three. Phase three. Phase three.”
Seven small ships swarmed out from behind the bulk of the Rope a Dope. It was the standard dragoon formation. Three mutually supporting patrol units of two ships each and one troop leader.
They came at the third Khlen from the side, taking full advantage of Gray tactical thinking. The Grays were firm believers in the concept of specialization. The Khlen’s were their version of a dropship.
They each had a large, forward-facing cannon with a twenty-degree traverse limit. The gun was only there to soften up ground targets on approach. If a Khlen needed support against other ships… well, that was what the Hichef fast-attack ships were for.
If the attackers were really Marines, they’d be accustomed to operating vessels that could defend themselves. The Gray ships were never meant to operate alone.
It was easy shooting for the dragoons as they tore open the third Khlen from its undefended flank, their conventional rounds making short work of the lightly armored hull.
“We salvaged a few loading doors from a derelict ore freighter,” Urbica explained as the dragoon troop reformed and disappeared aft. “Converted the aft atrium into a hangar. We’ve got two squadrons in there and another in ready-launch slots.
“We just pull an entire cabin module out and mount an airlock in the neighboring cabin. Gives us the ability to put three, seven-ship troops out in a matter of seconds if we need to get frisky.”
She gestured toward the exit. “Let’s go see what we managed to capture.” She led the way to the elevators. “We’ll start with the prisoners.”
The lounge they stepped out into was very different from the congenial gathering place Paul had passed through only minutes earlier. The chlorine-like stink of linearly accelerated rifles mingled with the stench of torn bodies.
Eight prisoners had been taken alive. They kneeled in a row, hands tied behind their backs.
She turned to Paul, leaning close. “Bet I can get one of them to reveal who they really are in less than sixty seconds,” she whispered.
“Colonel,” he hissed in her ear, “are you trying to show me up at my own profession? What magical method of interrogation are you planning to use?”
She leaned in closer. “Maybe I’ll just bat my eyelashes at them?” Chuckling, she strolled over to the youngest-looking prisoner.
Paul put a hand to his ear. He could still feel the heat of her breath. He was surprised to realize that, even with the shaved head and the tattoos and implants…
…batting her eyelashes would probably work on him.
“You,” she said loudly, nodding at the young prisoner. “How many people do you
have out here attacking the repeaters?”
He threw her a defiant look. “Hendricks, lance-corporal, Mike four twenty-three, seven two eight, six six one.”
“So your serial number starts with ‘Mike’, does it?” She grinned down at the dawning realization on the young man’s face. “So you’re an ex-Marine.”
He’d been given the usual training for a new inductee and it had been his undoing.
The basic resistance-to-interrogation course was nowhere near as comprehensive as the training received by Paul’s four Marine companions on Irricana. It concentrated on capture during high-intensity conflict.
They were run through endless scenarios where any deviation from name, rank and serial number would result in severe punishment. It was the best way to avoid talking to an interrogator. The minute you start talking, the game is up.
Urbica had used that conditioned reflex to slip past his guard. If she’d asked his name, rank and serial number, she probably would’ve gotten some bullshit about striking a blow for freedom.
“Separate them,” she told the officer in charge. “Start with Hendricks, here. He’s chatty. If he doesn’t talk, give some thought to the fact he’s connected with the disappearance of your little brother.”
The dragoon had been heading for prisoner Hendricks but he snapped his head around to look at her. “Are you serious?”
She nodded. “We’re pretty sure the missing person cases on Irricana all trace back to these assholes. They want to make it look like folks are sneaking off-world to join the secessionists so they ‘disappeared’ enough people to account for their fake rebellion.”
The dragoon officer took a deep breath. He turned back to Hendricks, pulling a wicked-looking knife from his hip sheath. He nodded to two of his men and they grabbed the prisoner.
“You’d better start talking the second we get you in that room over there,” he told him, “or I’m gonna start carving you up like a Rundlemass goose.”
‘You can’t!” Hendricks’ eyes darted around the room. “The Ceres Convention prohibits torture. We’re Marines taken in…”
Rebels and Patriots (Imperium Cicernus Book 3) Page 9
