Cara immediately connected the hornet pilots to Ben and to each other in a broad gestalt. The hornets, wickedly fast and with the ability to sting, immediately engaged the larger of the two gate modules, the crew and control section. Their objective was to take out the pulse-cannon and missile launchers, then to lay down covering fire for Solar Wind to make a run at the gate impeller.
Ben began his run from above before the nearest ships had registered Solar Wind’s presence. A flash showed one missile launched, but Hornet One intercepted it with a sure shot. Hornet Two buzzed gate control and landed a pulse on the upper surface where there was a clear gun turret. It exploded in a cloud of debris.
A thump, felt rather than heard, meant that Solar Wind had been caught in the debris field. An alarm sounded.
“Small hull breach in aft section four,” Cara said. “Section sealed.”
Hornet Two wasn’t so lucky. It was caught by shrapnel from its own blast and veered off tumbling end over end. Cara lost contact with the gunner and the pilot let loose a long string of colorful invective while she fought to stabilize the little craft. Hornet Three swung around and took several potshots at the lower turret.
An Arquavisa supply ship, a long series of pods attached to a spinal gantry, began to emerge from the gate.
Aware of the hornets through Cara’s link, Ben spiraled toward the gate impeller. Gwala lined up a missile then followed it up with a burst of pulses. The impeller shuddered and split apart. There was no spectacular explosion, since the unit carried no atmosphere, but the gate ellipse winked out. The supply ship hadn’t cleared the disk and the aft section simply vanished, leaving the forward flight deck and two and a half pods barreling forward under their own momentum, spilling crates behind like a trail of gifts from a piñata. Hornet One turned and peppered the intact pods.
*Leave it, Hornet One,* Cara ordered. *Don’t miss the bus.*
Alerted by the destruction of the gate, the Bellatkin popped back into realspace and scooped up Hornet Three. Hornet One didn’t break away in time. One of the Monitor battlewagons had turned to present a battery of pulse-cannon. The hornet exploded, its cabin oxygen providing the briefest of flares.
Cara cut contact as quickly as she could, but Ben saw out of his peripheral vision that she was shaking her head to clear it. She didn’t drop contact with the others, though.
*Bellatkin, take the one you’ve got and run,* Ben ordered. *We’ll get Two.*
The second hornet had been knocked for a loop and was outside of the melee forming around the dead gate. Ben turned Solar Wind and dived after it with Gwala laying down covering fire behind.
*Hornet Two, can you stabilize?* Ben asked.
*Trying my best, but I’ve lost a maneuvering thruster starboard.*
*Stand by.*
Ben swept Solar Wind kissing close and popped into foldspace, dragging Hornet Two in alongside. Then he settled the Solar Wind over the damaged hornet so that it passed through the outer skin. When it was firmly inside the cargo hold, he flipped out of foldspace again, emerging close in to Crossways.
“Crossways has a medical team standing by for Hornet Two,” Cara said as they swept into Port 22, running hot.
*Bellatkin?* Ben asked through Cara’s active link.
*Right behind you,* Alia said. *Thought we’d better not upset Crossways Control again.*
*Well?* Mother Ramona asked through her Telepath, Ully.
*Mission accomplished,* Cara said.*The rest is up to you.*
*Get yourselves up here to the control room.*
Mother Ramona’s command hit Cara as she and Ben emerged from Solar Wind. The maintenance crew began to crawl all over the ship to repair the hull breach as the emergency team from Dockside Medical moved in to extract the pilot and gunner from the damaged hornet in the hold. The pilot was still cursing fluently, which was a sure sign she was okay, but Cara thought the gunner was probably lost. The gunner’s a goner kept playing in her head and she felt mean, but knew it was just the letdown from the adrenaline that had been coursing through her system.
“Have you got nerves of steel?” she asked Ben.
He held out both hands and she noticed a slight tremor. “I’m okay while it’s all happening, but afterward it always gets me.”
“Mother Ramona wants us up in Crossways Control.”
“You mean I have to look those Control guys in the eye?”
She laughed. “I’m afraid so.”
They took a tub to the hub and then Garrick’s private elevator up to where Crossways Control bulged outward into space at the top of the spindle.
“Ah, the famous Ben Benjamin.” One of the controllers looked up and grinned at him. “You just won me fifty creds. I bet you’d emerge within thirty klicks of us and you did. Twenty-nine point four nine, to be precise. Briggs here figured fifty and Robbie was way out. He figured you’d actually stick to the rules this time.”
“Sorry, guys. Injured pilot. Bellatkin came in on the hundred mark.” Ben tried to look innocent and failed. “Okay, you got me, sorry.”
“Hey, you did all right,” Briggs said. “The hornet you brought back—pilot’s married to my wife’s cousin. Thanks for bringing her home.”
“Benjamin, in here if you will?” Mother Ramona waved them into a side room that contained a holographic three-dimensional plan of Crossways hanging in midair above one end of a long table and a second hologram on a different scale, showing the station and its environs.
“Well done, Ben.” Garrick looked up from where he was leaning over the table. “We owe you.”
“I’m afraid I lost three of your hornet crew.”
“Two. The gunner’s injured, but he’ll pull through. The other two are casualties of war. And I think we can safely call this a war, don’t you?”
“I’m sure Alphacorp will call it policing, but, yes, it’s war. Have you put out warnings to the independents?”
“It’s gone out all over the S-LOGosphere and the tel-net and we’ve warned Jamundi and your grandmother to keep a communications blackout. They’re safely out of it.”
Cara glanced sideways, but Ben didn’t show any emotion. He was all business again and his hands had lost the tremor.
“What’s the defensive capability of the station?”
“Pulse-cannon, missiles and a laser array, four corvettes, five frigates, and eight cruisers. All of the frigates and two of the cruisers have been retrofitted with jump drives, but they haven’t been on a shakedown run yet and we only have four jumpship pilots. The Magena sisters are each assigned to a cruiser, Valois and Sing each to a frigate, and I’ve even assigned Esterhazy to a corvette. There’s only you and Gen left. There are a hundred and fifty hornets, but they’re as likely to get taken out by friendly fire in this kind of exchange. I really wish I’d sent them all to Olyanda, that’s where they’d be the most useful. I’ve got five hundred remotely piloted drones available, operated by a mixture of regular drone pilots and Psi-Mechs. I’ve had to call up every reservist and we still don’t have anything to outgun a battlewagon. There are various private citizens who have put their firepower at our disposal, but it won’t be enough.”
“Maybe they only want us.”
Cara’s spine seemed to freeze at Ben’s words.
“No,” Garrick said. “They’ve been looking for an excuse to take us down for years and now they’ve got it.”
“But why here? Why now?” Cara asked. “Wouldn’t it make more sense to go after Olyanda?”
“Alphacorp has a tenuous legal claim on Crossways. It doesn’t have a claim on Olyanda.”
“No, but the Trust does,” Ben said. “And I didn’t see any Trust vessels among the fleet.”
They all looked at each other.
“He’s right,” Cara said. Alphacorp, Arquavisa, Ramsay-Shorre, Eastin-Heigle and even Rodontee, but no Trust.
Cara immediately forged a link to Oleg Staple. *Have you got trouble there?* she asked, opening the link to everyone.
*Negative.*
*Who’s guarding the gate?*
*McPherson onboard Sovereign.*
The nearest jump gate was on the edge of the system, days away at best sublight speed. It was one of the reasons Garrick had wanted a new gate closer to the planet.
*Check.*
*I have. She’s still transmitting . . . oh hell, it’s the old code. It should have changed at noon.*
*Prepare for incoming.*
*Right.*
*It could be everything the Trust can throw at you.*
*Understood.*
“Now what?” Mother Ramona asked.
“Now we wait,” Garrick said. “And we prepare.”
Ben turned to Cara. “Contact Yan and Lowenbrun. See if the ark’s ready for the Folds.”
*Jump drive’s just coming online now,* Yan said. *Haven’t tested it yet.*
*How’s the unloading?* Cara asked.
*Two more containers of cryo pods,* Jake said.
*How quickly can you offload them?*
*The medical staff on the ground have asked us to keep them up here for a while.*
*Forget that. We need the ark back here—top speed.*
*Okay. We can load them into shuttles in four hours if we have to.*
*Do it. Your shakedown run for the new drive will be straight back here. What about the ark’s former crew?*
*Their cryo pods are still on the ark.*
Cara relayed the information to Ben and then got back to Jake. *Ben says to send the crew cryo pods dirtside and keep them on ice. We’ll sort them out later.*
If there is a later, she thought.
The waiting was the worst. Ben sat in the corner of their war room while everyone else buzzed around him.
“You look too calm, are you even awake?” Cara had drunk so many cups of coffee that she was buzzing with caffeine and had gone to pee four times in three hours.
“I’m awake.”
“Want caff?”
He shook his head. “It won’t help.”
Three hours into their wait, Oleg Staple confirmed there was a Trust fleet heading for Olyanda. *We’re ready for them,* he said. *But any reinforcements you can send would be very welcome.*
An hour later the ark appeared out of foldspace a short fifty klicks from Crossways with a whoop from Jake. *Did we make it in time for the fun?*
*In time to get the hell out of here with fifty hornets in your hold,* Ben said. *Stand by to load. Take them to Olyanda. Get back for another pickup if you can, but the ark’s no warship, so avoid direct confrontation.*
*Understood.*
*And, Jake . . . *
*Yeah?*
*Thanks.*
Garrick deployed all the available ships with firepower, ordered all blast doors on Crossways closed and the viewports shuttered. The drone operators, some of them operating a single drone, others, Psi-Mechs, meshed into a flotilla, settled into their padded chairs in the room directly below the war room and sent a hundred of the drones to the far side of the station, leaving them prepped and ready. Another hundred were stationed twenty klicks above the spindle, with the third hundred thirty klicks below. All nonessential personnel were directed to the inner core of the station and weapons operators to the pulse-cannon and missile launchers. The remaining two hundred drones were ready to spring from their launchers at a moment’s notice. The paid crews had once laughed at the spare-time soldiers, but now they were working side by side with no complaints, or at least none that reached the control room.
Garrick’s guards, Tengue’s mercs, and private forces belonging to the various crimelords manned the docking bays in case of incursion, for now safely behind solid airlocks.
“Enemy fleet standing off at five hundred klicks.” Briggs’ voice came over the comm from traffic control next door.
“Incoming comms.” Ully, a small white-haired woman who looked older than Nan, had the comms station.
“Crossways, this is the Monitor Ship Oxford: stand down and prepare to be boarded.”
Garrick leaned into the comm. “Not gonna happen. You have no authority here.”
“We have warrants for five hundred individuals believed to have taken refuge on Crossways and a court order for the reclamation of Alphacorp property, to whit, the station itself.”
“Five hundred individuals? Now you’re getting ambitious.”
“Transmitting the list now.”
Ben glanced at it. As expected, his name and Cara’s were close to the top, but Norton Garrick and Ramona Delgath were on there as well, together with a number of names he didn’t recognize who were obviously notables in Crossways’ underworld.
“It’s a who’s who of the Crossways great and the good,” Mother Ramona said. “Well, maybe the not-so-good, if truth be told.” She smacked the table with the flat of her hand and the holograms swayed. “This is just an excuse. They’ll come at us hard whatever we do.”
“Monitor Ship Oxford,” Ben said. “You are exceeding your authority. This station is home to almost a million people, most of whom are not on your list. Any attack endangering civilians in the pursuit of criminals is regarded as using unnecessary force. Monitor regulation 19, section 1.” He turned. “Cara, broadcast that for me, please. It may slow them down.”
“Alphacorp has obtained a judgment against Crossways in the Interstellar Supreme Court,” MS Oxford transmitted.
“Crossways is a hunk of metal and ceramic, not a person. There are people on Crossways. I repeat: Regulation 19, section 1. Officers in breach of this regulation are subject to suspension and investigation.”
Cara transmitted the same thing again, and added, *This is already uploaded to the S-LOG, just in case you thought you could shut us up before anyone found out.*
“Stand by and prepare to be boarded.” This time it was another voice on the comm, not the Monitor ship.
“Unknown vessel, identify yourself,” Briggs answered.
“Alphacorp One, vessel 2C049, Sea Eagle. You’re outgunned, Crossways.”
“Heavy cruiser, armed with pulse-cannon and missiles. Potentially carries five hundred ground troops, and she’s just one of at least forty vessels.” Mother Ramona brought up the specs on screen.
“Shit!” Garrick held out his hand to silence Ben. “Go to hell, Sea Eagle, and take Alphacorp with you.”
The combined fleet came in fast and hard. The first missile hit the station just five seconds later.
“Level four, green sector, exterior skin breach,” Mother Ramona said. “Automatic sealant repair.”
“Laser array target incoming missiles,” Garrick said. “Pulse-cannon, fire at will as your sights come to bear. Unless the Monitor ships fire on us, don’t target them. There may still be some sense in all this. Make every shot count. Drone group one, get around behind the Alphacorp vessels. Hit them where it hurts.”
“Understood.”
Ben jerked upright at the sound of Serafin’s voice. *Serafin. I thought you were still in Dockside Medical.*
*I want to make sure Dockside Medical is still here this time tomorrow. Besides, all I have to do is sit here and fly a few drones. It’s hardly going to tax my breathing. Archie’s with me, and a few more Free Company volunteers.*
The lasers set up a sweeping barrage that took out a proportion of incoming missiles, but some got through and the Crossways’ hologram started to show damage.
“Deploy drone groups four and five,” Garrick said, and two hundred drones launched from the upper ring.
A corvette, two frigates, and two cruisers, all Crossways’ jumpships, appeared in realspace behind the enemy fleet.
The cruisers dropped thirty hornets between them, took out a destroyer class ship in a pincer movement and disappeared back into the Folds without receiving any damage. The corvette dithered and slipped sideways into foldspace. The two frigates launched a series of missiles at Alphacorp cruisers and winked out of realspace before they hit, but the missiles took out one ship and damaged three others.
“Yes!” Garrick punched the air.
Ben kept his eyes on the screens. Five ships down out of forty was still a hell of a lot of ships left to fight off.
The hornets began to target the drives of the larger ships. They didn’t have enough firepower to take down a cruiser or even a frigate individually unless they got lucky, but they could cripple a ship with a hit to the drive. They had less than five minutes to wreak havoc before three Alphacorp cruisers deployed a flotilla of drones, outnumbering them three to one.
All Ben could do was stand by and watch as one by one the hornets were snuffed out. He felt sick. He checked with Port 22, but Solar Wind’s repairs were still ongoing.
The Monitor battlewagons, at least for now, were standing back and observing, not taking an active part in the offensive. Hopefully he’d set the crews questioning their officers’ commands.
The five Crossways jumpships appeared out of nowhere again, targeted a cruiser, destroyed it and vanished, but not before picking up five surviving hornets. The next time, they all popped into being at different points, delivered significant damage and disappeared. One of their targets was left floating dead, another broke up in slow motion. A third was spinning end over end.
It couldn’t last. The next time the ships emerged from foldspace the corvette, Esterhazy’s ship, collided with an Alphacorp cruiser that was on its immediate flight path. The resulting destruction was instant and complete. Both ships reduced to space junk in the blink of an eye. The debris took out one of the smaller Alphacorp ships while the four remaining Crossways ships melted back into the Folds.
“I should be out there with them,” Ben said.
“In what? The Dixie Flyer?” Cara asked.
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