Paul shuddered. There it was again. That overpowering reaction following a near-death situation. He wondered if Urbica felt the same way and how she managed to master it. He realized she was staring at him, her breathing shallow and rapid.
“Never did like leaving unfinished business,” she said quietly. Before Paul could work out what she meant, he found himself shoved up against the back of the desk so hard it fell over behind him.
This kiss was far more passionate than the previous one and she dropped her pistol, freeing another hand for reconnaissance duty.
Paul found himself on his back without even remembering the fall onto the desk. He was a little rusty with the catches of under-armor suits and she moved his hand out of the way to do it herself.
Clearly, he’d been less effective than he’d thought at hiding his growing attraction for her.
Things Can't Get Worse... Right?
“Oh, shit!” Urbica sat up and began tugging her under-armor suit back into place.
“That’s not what a fella usually hears afterward,” Paul mused, staring up at the grimy ceiling.
“No…” She stopped herself from saying something and turned to face him. “Not that. The detonator was activated for a reason. Something is happening up there and we’re down here acting like a couple of horny teenagers.”
“Dammit!” Paul sat up and shoved his arms back into his suit. “This was time we couldn’t afford…”
She spared him a lopsided grin. “Yeah, well, don’t flatter yourself, mister. It wasn’t that much time…” She grabbed the 30mm warhead and raced back along the path to the ship.
“Ouch,” he muttered as he stumbled after her.
Fortunately, the occupants of the ship were far too occupied with the threat of a rogue warhead to notice any peculiar behavior from the pair. “Warhead’s been neutralized.” She tossed it to a Marine and continued into the cockpit. “Get us back into orbit,” she ordered. “The remote was activated on us so something alarming is going on out there.”
They banked hard and raced into the tunnel at full velocity.
“Orbital control,” the pilot began in a calm voice, “be advised, the export Gray vessel coming out of the aqueduct tunnel is an irregular Marine call-sign on emergency duty. Open the main egress doors or they will be blasted off their mountings.”
He nodded with satisfaction. “Should buy us a few seconds,” he muttered. He pulled back hard on the control yoke as they exited the tunnel. The industrial and commercial zones flashed by and Paul’s feet lifted off the floor as the small ship angled down toward the gates at the edge of the upper ring.
Paul and Urbica both flinched as the gate frames flashed by. In less time than it took to say ‘gate’ they were through the egress tunnel and back into the buffeting atmosphere.
“Holy batter-fried forest gnomes!” the pilot exclaimed. “The orbitals are lousy with Gray ships!” He punched in a sequence on the main pad.
“If nobody has any objections…” He shot a quick glance at Urbica. “I’m gonna bend space back to the rendezvous.”
“Do it,” she ordered. “Do it from down here. We don’t want to go out there and get splashed.” She nodded out at the stars.
“I’ll give us a little more angle at the other end, seeing as we’ll be bringing a chunk of high-energy atmosphere with us.” The pilot engaged the distortion drive and the hazy weather shimmered out of existence.
Urbica blew out a deep breath. Her gaze lost focus on the outside world and Paul realized she was reviewing data. “Mind if I link?” he asked her. “I’d like to get a look at what we’re facing.”
She nodded and his retinal display activated, showing a new connection option. He accessed the highlighted data pool and opened a visual room.
The visual room was a way of occluding external input while reviewing data. His brain only saw the ship and its passengers as a faint haze while the ‘room’ appeared solid and neutral in color.
He put the tactical data into the room and rotated the display to put the Dauntless closer to his position.
“About eighty Gray ships?” he asked out loud.
“Yeah,” she replied. “Are they taking advantage of the rash of internal conflicts in this sector or are they in bed with the conspirators?
“Never mind that,” she amended. “Their dispositions clearly indicate their intention to support the Dauntless rather than attack.”
“Seneca,” Paul declared.
“You think he’s behind this?”
“I found one of his assets tied up with the courtesans back on home-world. He’ll use any angle to get an advantage. I wouldn’t put it past him to make an alliance with the Grays.”
“If he’s going to hand Irricana and Santa Clara over to the Grays, then the doomsday threat isn’t going to stop CentCom from attacking. They’d rather destroy the planets than see aliens get them.”
“I don’t think he’s planning to take those worlds out of the Imperium,” Paul replied slowly, marshaling his thoughts as he talked. “I think he plans to become the power behind the throne. He can shut the military down in a matter of weeks if he holds the two planets.
“Hell, the entire data-net throughout the Imperium would be at his mercy. All commerce would cease if we don’t keep him happy.”
She sighed. “He wants the Grays as support. An added deterrence against a sneak assault by Force Recon.”
“And the Grays would go for it, purely for the face gained,” Paul added. “They already exert a lot of influence on their side of the Rim. If they could call the shots inside the Imperium…”
“Tāmāde!” she cursed softly. “Zhēntāmā yàomìng!”
“To put it mildly,” Paul agreed. “If they pull this off, they can finally stop paying reparations.”
The windows in front of them went dark and they dropped out of their distorted bubble of space. “Comms are back up,” the pilot advised.
“Take us to the Xipe Totec,” she told him. “We’ll drop the Marines and then head straight back to the ‘Dope’.”
She focused on a random screen in the dash for a few seconds and then Paul saw a queued message in his on-board CPU, inviting him to join a conference. He opened another visual room and synchronized it with the conference address.
Tony was already there standing next to her, staring at the projected dispositions around Irricana. He gave Paul an absent nod. “Thanks for bringing my guys back in one piece. Were they any help?”
“It was your boys that found out the 538 had been smuggled out here,” he told him, “and they just told me there’s a big media push going on out here to make the Grays look like the second ascension of Montgomery.”
“Told you they were my best.”
“No argument here,” Paul said. “They’d make good officers.”
A grim smile. “The only thing the Nathaniels can offer them right now is an early grave.” He shifted gears. “So if the Grays are here, it must be Seneca.”
Paul nodded in agreement. “That cop we tossed in the arc furnace was one of Seneca’s assets. He doesn’t loan anything or anyone…”
“You killed a cop?” Urbica interrupted.
“He wasn’t a very nice guy,” Paul assured her. “And besides,” he continued, aiming a thumb at Tony, “he’s done worse.”
“Ass,” Tony growled.
“You know, I’ve been hearing that a lot lately.” Paul shook his head mournfully.
“If we can get back to the matter at hand,” Urbica said forcefully, pointing to a red icon. “What’s this?”
“We think it’s the 538, or their ships at least,” Tony explained. “We’ve been picking up the synch beacons from the local gates and it looks like these ships are heading for Irricana.”
“ETA?”
“Three hours from now.” He touched the icon and a second copy appeared next to Irricana. “We estimate the dropout point to be here, but it’ll take time to get full crews into them.”
“Th
ey don’t have full crews, Tony,” Paul told him. “They lost most of their guys just before you showed up.”
Urbica bit her lower lip as she took in the situation. “This could work. We’re five minutes out so we’ve got enough time to brief everybody.” She looked up at Tony.
“This is going to get hairy.”
The Battle for Gliese
The two Khlen-class ships tumbled into the black just outside Irricanan orbit. The lead pilot hailed the Dauntless immediately after clearing the plasma burst, requesting a docking pattern and advising of a potential abduction threat against Colonel Kinsey.
The traffic control officer was suddenly very concerned that he may have already allowed an abduction team aboard. He realized, from the warning, that Colonel Kinsey may have been snatched off the Dauntless through his own incompetence.
In his distracted state, he allowed the two Khlens to land, each one packed with forty dragoons.
Though the Khlen could carry twenty-five Marines, the dragoons wore lighter armor and they didn’t worry about having everyone stand in front of a hand pole. They were crammed in so tightly they might as well have been wearing five-point harnesses.
And then they’d shoved more men on top, like crowd surfers.
The landing struts of the cheaply made ships groaned as they set down inside the main hangar. It had been a gamble, but Tony had convinced Urbica that non-Marine ships would be received in the main hangar rather than the Marine bay.
It made the initial fight a lot easier. The Dragoons poured out of the two small vessels like the crew of a vaudeville ship. They quickly cut down all resistance and set the entry shielding to full power. Now a clever commander wouldn’t be able to insert a team of Marines behind them by ferrying them outside the ship.
The assault commander led them over to the cargo sledges, chopping his hand along an imaginary line, bisecting the twelve vehicles into two groups of six.
“The team heading to engineering, take those,” he shouted. “The CIC team comes with me in these ones.”
The dragoons grabbed breaching blankets from the damage control lockers and draped them over the front of their sledges. They secured the upper edges to the control station at the front of each vehicle.
The breaching blankets were two meters square and filled with a fixatropic liquid metal compound. In the event of a hull breach, the blankets could be thrown over the hole and the filling would turn solid from the force of the air.
They also came in handy as impromptu armor. The flexible plates would turn temporarily solid when hit by small arms fire. A similar type of material was used to seal the gaps in combat armor.
The two convoys maneuvered out into the main passageway and went their separate ways, scattering unarmed crewmen as they accelerated toward their targets. They knew better than to trust the ship’s own monorail. If it was shut down, they’d be trapped.
“Well, well,” Tony muttered under his breath. “Aren’t we all just a cozy little pack of traitors…”
The display that had populated on dropout showed the Dauntless and her escorts sitting close to the ships of the 538. None of them seemed the least bit concerned about the large fleet of Gray warships sitting in Imperial territory. Though the two fleets faced one another, their shields were down.
He opened a channel to the commander of his air-group. “Launch everything,” he ordered. “You know the plan. Good hunting.”
On the holo-display he could see his ships leaving the Xipe Totec and streaking through the formation of 538 ships.
The skeleton crews aboard the 538 vessels were in no position to take action, even if they could find the resolve to fire on Marine ships without direct orders.
Tony’s ships headed straight for the Gray fleet. As they crossed the maximum range threshold, they opened up with their forward batteries.
Seconds later, the first antimatter rounds began impacting the Gray ships and the initial results were devastating. Even the smaller rounds were sufficient to destroy a medium-sized city and they were fired from multi-barrel guns.
The first few rounds of the salvo stripped away the navigation shielding and the very next round was all it took to vaporize the ship itself. Almost a third of the enemy fleet had been destroyed outright by the surprise assault.
Now, as their combat shielding came on-line, the Marine ships wheeled around and fled back toward the ships of the 538. Every Gray ship still able to answer to helm instructions began turning toward the undermanned Marine ships.
They began to concentrate fire on the rearmost ships of the fleeing 488 squadrons.
“Five of ours are down so far, sir,” the sensor officer advised.
“Now would be a good time, Colonel,” Tony said under his breath.
The screens returned to normal shading as the plasma burst faded. Urbica stepped forward though the reflex wouldn’t improve her view of the maneuver’s effects. Not that it was in doubt.
“Yes!” the sensor officer shouted. “We ripped them a new one!”
Tumbling sections of hull were spreading out from the drop wash of the Rope a Dope. As they watched, a Gray cruiser tried to shear away but she was too late to evade the impact of a large piece of wreckage. The large warship began drifting.
“We’re away,” Liang advised. His squadron had gone through the short distortion hop attached to the outside of the mother-ship’s hull. Eddie had already launched his ready-squadron and the third, under Dimitry, was just waiting for the hangar door to finish opening.
Liang’s ride had been risky, but there would be no need to wait fifteen minutes to get the third squadron out of the hangar.
“Good hunting,” she told him, “and keep to your zones. The 488 are coming back in and I don’t want you shooting each other.” She muted the channel and set a new icon in the holo display. “Helm, bring us alongside that Gray cruiser. I want a backup flagship for the regiment.”
The forward boarding team reached the bridge of the Dauntless with surprisingly little resistance. The majority of her Marines were away playing at rebels and most of the crew were unsure whom to follow. Most of them hadn’t signed on for treason and they showed little interest in fighting Imperial troops, even if they were boarders.
The assault commander led his team onto the bridge. “This vessel has given aid and support to secessionists,” he declared. “The command staff are under provisional charges of treason against his Imperial Majesty; long may he reign.”
Silence and fear.
“Shut down the transit system, lock down all portals and set all weapon systems to safe mode.” He waved his team forward and they moved to stand behind the operators.
“Failure to comply will result in summary conviction and a sentence of death will be carried out immediately as per the ICI investigator of record, Paul Grimm.
“In simple tones that even the Navy can understand,” he explained, “if you don’t shut down everything but life support, we’re under orders to blow your heads off.”
“This is not how my investigations usually go,” Paul told Urbica through his suit’s short-range communications system. He was standing on the outside of the Rope a Dope’s hull, along with Urbica and more than a thousand of her dragoons. He tried not to think about the weak magnetic plates that held him in place.
It was so quiet out here.
He looked up as the enemy cruiser grew closer. “How many crew does that thing carry?”
“Less than you’d think,” she replied. “Their real ships are heavily automated. They probably only have a couple hundred crew and they don’t seem to think boarding is a possibility. We boarded three ships at the Carbon Well and resistance was minimal.”
“You’ve taken real Gray ships?”
“For a little while,” she answered obliquely’ “They managed to activate self-destruct mechanisms.”
“Are we sure we want to do this?” Paul was starting to wonder at her sanity. Her taste in men was dodgy enough, but boarding a ship that
had a high likelihood of exploding seemed a little askew.
“Well, you know the old saying,” she breezed. “Fourth time’s the charm.”
“Actually, it’s supposed to be the third time,” he corrected.
“Is it? Ah, well that just means we’re due for a break, doesn’t it?”
Before he could think of an answer to that, she crouched, cut power to her mag plates and jumped for the cruiser. Paul scrambled to follow, heaving away from the Rope a Dope with all his strength.
He reflected, as the cruiser filled his field of vision with alarming speed, that it might have been a little too much strength. His own augmented strength, coupled with the ability-enhancing light armor worn by the dragoons had sent him on his way with far more speed than he’d expected.
He slammed into the alien ship with alarming force, rebounding past an antenna array which proved to be his salvation. He grabbed one of the long metal rods and arrested his momentum.
He saw a shape flit past in his peripheral vision and turned to see Urbica land feet first on the hull with a graceful bend of the knees.
She looked up at him. “Quit goofing around and come down from there before they try to transmit and fry your dumb ass.”
Feeling like an idiot, he activated his mag plates and pushed against the antenna to rotate his body and achieve enough momentum to reach the hull. He managed to land feet first and, after a breath of relief, set off after Urbica.
They reached an airlock and she punched the big red button to open it. “Told you they don’t give any thought to being boarded,” she told him. “They don’t even bother with a simple pass-code on the airlocks.”
She looked around. “I see eight people heading for this door. We’ll wait for them before going in.”
As the last of the eight moved inside, Urbica and Paul followed. “Remember, it only takes one of the bastards to blow the ship, so kill them all. They’d kill themselves anyway, but our way is a hell of a lot better.” With that, she punched the inner red button and the outer door slid shut.
Rebels and Patriots (Imperium Cicernus Book 3) Page 13
