Ballistic

by Marko Kloos

  “It’s a sight, isn’t it?” Tristan said next to him, pulling Aden out of his dark thoughts. He nodded slowly in response with what he hoped was a sufficiently awestruck expression.

  They coasted into position for the docking maneuver, propelled only by occasional quick bursts from the ship’s thrusters. The helm was under the control of the station’s AI now, but Maya still had her hands near her own flight controls, ready to override Pallas One if anything started to look wrong. Aden had yet to meet a single pilot who fully trusted any AI with their ship.

  “Get ready for one g, people. Engaging clamps in three . . . two . . . one,” Maya announced. The hull shuddered lightly with the contact of the clamps locking onto the hard points on Zephyr’s hull.

  They had been weightless since Maya cut the main drive a little while ago when the deceleration burn was finished, but as Zephyr engaged the docking clamps and entered Pallas One’s powerful gravmag field, Aden could feel gravity returning gradually, turning the deck flooring into down again.

  “In position for hard dock at Alpha Five Three. And here comes the docking collar.” Maya watched the process on the visual feed from the ship’s starboard hull, where a flexible passageway extended from the side of the station and connected with the outer airlock ring of Zephyr.

  “Service lines are connected. Collar is pressurizing. Annnnnnnd . . . we have atmo. Green lights on the starboard airlock. Hard dock confirmed. You can all get up and stretch your legs until we get security clearance to come across.”

  “About time,” Tess said next to Aden. She raised her gravity couch into the seated configuration and unbuckled her harness with one well-practiced move. “Because I really, really have to get rid of some internal ballast.”

  “After you, then,” Aden said.

  Down in the airlock deck, Captain Decker activated the screen projection of her wrist comtab. Aden watched as she cycled through a few data fields.

  “Lady Mina just paid up,” she declared. “They’ll whine about this for a while.”

  “Let them demand a rematch,” Maya said.

  Aden had no idea what Maya had done before joining Zephyr, but judging by the experience level of the rest of the crew, he guessed it was an interesting story if she managed to get the pilot job at her age. She was twenty-seven, the youngest member of the crew by half a decade. She was also the shortest, with the slight build of an Acheroni, and she wore her dark hair shaved close to her skull. In his three months on the ship, he hadn’t had many conversations with her, and he had only stopped wanting to take it personally when he had noticed that she didn’t chat much with the rest of the crew either.

  “They’re not going to do us that favor,” Decker replied. “The ’Syne data says they only barely broke ten g, and I bet they were giving it all they had.”

  She flicked her finger across the projected screen in front of her comtab to shuffle some data around and turned her wrist to make the projection disappear again.

  “I subtracted the refueling cost for what we burned on that sprint and split up what’s left between all of us. Let’s go drink it away, because it’s not enough to do much else with it.”

  “No, this is good.” Henry had retrieved a jacket from one of the lockers in the airlock deck and was putting it on over his flight suit with care. “We get to replace the fuel and get a little drunk, no more. It was a perfect amount for a wager. Not enough to cause hard feelings.”

  Aden noticed that Henry hadn’t bothered to take off the kukri he usually wore in a locking sheath on his left side. None of the stations Aden had ever set foot into allowed weapons, but he figured that the ship’s first officer knew the regulations, and that he had a reason for what he was doing.

  The last one to arrive at the airlock deck was Tess, who climbed up the ladderway from the engineering deck. She had put on the top of her flight suit properly again, though it looked like it was a fresh suit from the locker in her berthing compartment.

  “Reactor is on standby. Temps are back down to normal. I want to inspect the heat sinks visually from the outside before we head out again—make sure nothing fell off. Took a while longer to bleed off the residual than I would have liked.”

  “Your baby,” Decker said. “But be absolutely sure if we need to dip into the maintenance budget right before the three-year overhaul.”

  It felt odd to walk through a docking collar instead of floating through it. Pallas One’s gravmag rotors generated one g everywhere on the station, right out to all the ships that had physical contact with it. Rumor had it that the Palladians were on the verge of introducing gravity-based atmospheric containment fields, and the next generation of space stations wouldn’t need docking clamps and collars anymore. Technology had marched on again at a brisk pace after the stasis imposed by the war, when every economy in the system had been churning out weapons and war material to shovel into the furnace of conflict.

  At the end of the Alpha docking section, they had to pass through a security checkpoint before they could enter the main part of the station. Aden watched as Tristan stepped through the scanner array, then Decker, then Maya. When it was Henry’s turn, the flooring underneath his feet lit up in red, but the Palladian security officer merely saluted and let him pass despite the curved thirty-centimeter blade hanging from Henry’s belt in a magnetic sheath.

  “Veteran perk,” Tess explained when Aden looked at her with a raised eyebrow.

  “How so?”

  “Pallas Brigade. You know the thing with their knives, right?”

  “Sort of. I know it’s a traditional thing.”

  “They get a kukri when they make it through training. The sheath is coded to the owner. The kukri won’t come out for anyone else. You see someone with a kukri and a sheath like that, he’s brigade or used to be. And they are exempt from weapons laws. On Pallas anyway.”

  Aden took his turn through the scanner. The floor under his feet remained green. He waited on the other side for Tess to take her turn.

  “Well,” Aden said when she had rejoined him. “The knife thing is a little strict. I mean, I get that a gun can poke a hole into a pressure hull. But how much damage can you do to station infrastructure with a knife?”

  Tess chuckled.

  “Those kukris have monomolecular blades. The sheath keeps them that way. I’ve seen Henry stick that thing right through the primary locking clamp on an escape pod hatch. They are trusting their veterans an awful lot, letting them keep those things everywhere they go.”

  Tristan had been walking a few steps ahead of them. Now he slowed his step a little so they could catch up.

  “The knife ban isn’t for people like Henry,” he said. “It’s for morons like us. Spacers from somewhere else. So we don’t stab each other at the bar after we get fucked up on Pallas liquor.”

  Aden smiled, not sure whether to take it as a joke or as a legitimate fact.

  “So Palladian food is a ten on the spicy scale, and everyone else is a two or a three except for Acheron,” he recalled, and Tristan nodded.

  “Where does their alcohol rank?” Aden asked.

  “What’s your number two or three on that scale?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe a Rhodian malt. Or a seaweed infusion from Adrasteia. The midgrade stuff, not the garbage that comes in a plastic bladder.”

  “In that case, the shit up here is a fifteen,” Tristan said. “And you’re buying the first round, by the way.”

  “Why, because I’m the new crew member?”

  Tristan laughed, pleased to be able to deliver the punch line.

  “No, because you may not be conscious enough after the first round to buy another.”

  CHAPTER 6

  DUNSTAN

  RNS Danae was a light cruiser of the D class. At her commissioning, only seven years ago, she had been 150 meters long from the tip of her bow array to the end of her drive cone, and she had weighed over five thousand tons in standard gravity. The torn and mangled hull remnant that was drif
ting in space in front of Minotaur was barely bigger than a patrol corvette. Minotaur’s AIC was dead silent as they circled Danae’s wreckage at a safe distance, letting the AI map out every square millimeter of what was left of the other ship.

  “That’s the bow section,” Mayler finally said. He brought up a schematic of a D-class cruiser and superimposed it on the visual feed. “Maneuvering deck, AIC, airlock, and pod deck. Everything below the pod deck is gone.”

  “That was no gun cruiser,” Dunstan said.

  “I don’t think so, sir. There aren’t any impact holes in what’s left of the hull. Whatever hit them, it wasn’t a rail-gun salvo.”

  “Like something grabbed the ship in the middle and just ripped it apart.” Bosworth zoomed in on the visual to take a closer look at the twisted and ragged edges of the shattered hull plating.

  “More like it blew up from the inside,” Dunstan said. “Look how that armor plating is bowed out, and how the hull has buckled—here and here.” He indicated the spots on the screen.

  “Maybe it wasn’t an attack after all. Maybe they had a technical malfunction. Hypervelocity debris going through their missile magazine, something like that.”

  “We’re still looking at a hundred dead crew. I doubt they’d appreciate the distinction,” Dunstan replied. “Anything at all on the emergency channel?”

  “No, sir. We’ve been sounding off on all frequencies since we came out of the burn and flipped. The only thing broadcasting is the crash buoy. No life pods, no suit transmitters, nothing.”

  “The front section is still more or less in one piece. They should have gotten at least a few pods off, even if all the power circuits went dead at the same time. What in Hades happened here?”

  Nobody in the AIC ventured a guess at an answer.

  “Helm, get us behind what’s left of their command section and match the rotation of the wreckage,” Dunstan ordered. “Keep your distance. Make it five hundred meters.”

  “Aye, sir,” Midshipman Boyer replied. “Coming about and matching rotation.”

  Boyer used the maneuvering thrusters of the ship to line up Minotaur with the remains of Danae, then initiated a longitudinal spin that matched the movement of the cruiser’s mangled bow section exactly. Dunstan noted with satisfaction that she accomplished the feat manually, without letting the ship’s AI take over the final adjustments.

  “Rotation is in sync, sir. We are holding station five hundred meters astern and turning at one point three meters per second.”

  “Very well, Boyer.”

  Looking up into the violated hull of Danae felt like staring into the open chest cavity of a corpse. Severed fiber links and supply lines snaked out of dented and cracked bulkheads. Minotaur only had one central ladderway along the ship’s spine, but the D-class cruisers like Danae were large enough to have two. They went from the maneuvering deck at the top of the ship all the way to the reactor room at the bottom, and seeing both of them open to space made it look to Dunstan like the trachea and esophagus visible in the neck of a severed head.

  “XO, tell the marines to get a boarding party suited up. I want them to go over there and see if they can make it up the open ladderways to the command deck. But no risky business. Anything they can’t open manually or with the plasma cutters, leave it for the recovery team once they get here. If the data core is still intact, the fleet techs will figure it out. Right now, we are looking for survivors. Understood?”

  “Aye, sir,” Bosworth replied and punched up the comms link on his console. “Marine country, this is the XO. Sergeant Bosca, you are going for a little stroll. Get your team geared up for EVA and meet me on the airlock deck in fifteen minutes.”

  The AIC crew watched as the boarding team from Minotaur’s marine detachment launched from the airlock a short while later. The marines fired short bursts from the thrusters of their EVA suits and coasted over to the remains of RNS Danae in irregular intervals, spaced apart widely so that one explosion or rail-gun salvo couldn’t blot the entire team out of space at once. The armor suits for boarding actions were coated in a layer of flat black carbon composite that made their wearers very tiny sensor targets, and even to the optics from Minotaur’s sensors, the marines were almost invisible against the nothingness of deep space as they covered the distance to the wreck in radio silence. When they were almost at what was now the stern of the wreck, each marine turned and fired thrusters toward their target to slow down again. Dunstan had some experience with EVA suits, and trying to stop at a particular point in space was a hard thing to accomplish, but these marines trained for boarding actions constantly, and he watched with some pride as the team turned and burned, then got into position on the outside of the torn hull with pinpoint accuracy. One by one, they disappeared inside the wreckage.

  “Minotaur, this is Bosca. We are at the aft end of the central ladderway pair. One is blocked about ten meters in. The other seems mostly clear.”

  The telemetry from the marines’ EVA suits came online and showed eight different helmet view perspectives, which Lieutenant Bosworth arranged in an arc over the main tactical display.

  “Send up the bots and see what it looks like up top,” Dunstan ordered. “Remember—no unnecessary risks. Anything looks like it’s about to blow, you pull your team out.”

  “Understood, sir.”

  Bosca’s perspective shifted as the marine sergeant looked up the dark ladderwell, then tapped a control on his lower left arm. Half a dozen little personal recon drones, each the size of a thumb, ejected from recesses in Bosca’s armor and swarmed up into the ladderwell to scout the wreckage above the team.

  “This girl really got her back snapped in half,” Bosca said and looked around for the benefit of the AIC crew. “Everything below frame forty is gone, and the rest isn’t looking so good. I don’t think there’s an airtight deck left above us. There are shrapnel holes all over these bulkheads.”

  Dunstan and Bosworth exchanged a look.

  “That was a war shot,” Bosworth said. “Hit it right in the sweet spot, dead center next to the missile silo.”

  Dunstan looked at the array of visual feeds from the marine helmets again. The evidence was undeniable: scorch marks and jagged holes in bulkheads that only had one likely source. He had only ever seen battle damage like this during the war, when ships took hits from armor-piercing antiship missiles that got through the point defenses.

  “I hate to agree with you, Lieutenant. Because that means there’s someone out there who’s deliberately gunning for navy ships. Someone who can get close enough to a modern light cruiser to get a missile through her point defenses and blow her in half before her crew can even send an alert.”

  “Something stealthy,” Bosworth offered. “Like the ghost we were chasing around the internment yard right before the fuzzhead fleet blew all to hell. But they launched on us, remember? The point defense got both missiles. And our systems aren’t half as good as what’s on a D-class cruiser.”

  Dunstan shrugged.

  “Best guess? We knew they were sneaking around out there. We had active drones out to pin them down. They launched from over sixty klicks out as soon as we got a solid sensor return. Maybe they knew they couldn’t get any closer without us burning through their stealth. This crew here had no idea anyone was in the neighborhood.”

  “The point defense only takes two seconds to fully energize once it detects incoming,” Lieutenant Mayler said from his station. “Even if the crew didn’t set it to active status manually. Another second at most for the AI to fire the emitters.”

  “Two seconds,” Dunstan repeated. “They were less than five klicks away when they launched. Maybe less than three.”

  “Nobody is that stealthy,” Bosworth said.

  “It appears that someone is, Lieutenant. Because if they launched close enough to beat the point defense AI on a D class, it means they were just about close enough to read the registry number off the hull.”

  “Minotaur, Bosca.” The v
oice of the marine sergeant cut into their discussion.

  “Go ahead, Sergeant,” Dunstan said.

  “The drones made it up the ladderwell to the pod deck hatch. It’s sealed, but there’s no atmo showing on the other side of that bulkhead. I’m going up to cut the interlock open.”

  “Affirmative. But go easy with it.”

  “Reckless isn’t on the menu for me right now, sir. Stand by.”

  They watched Bosca float up into the ladderwell until he reached the sealed hatch of the pod deck, ten meters up from where the ship had been blown in half. The pressure indicators next to the hatch showed a red triangle, indicating there was no air on the other side. The indicators were mechanical and needed no power, but even if they were somehow faulty, Dunstan knew that Bosca would not be able to open the steel hatch up into a pressurized deck because the pressure would keep it in its seal even with the interlocks cut away. Bosca turned on the plasma cutter in his EVA armor and went to work, slicing through the bulkhead plating slowly and expertly. When he was finished, he turned the plasma cutter off and took a deep breath that sounded just a tiny bit ragged.

  “Here goes,” he said. “Boarding team, stand by for a quick exit if you hear a really loud noise.”

  He pushed up against the hatch with the palm of his armored hand. Dunstan heard the power-assist servos let out a little whine as Bosca increased the force of his push gradually. The hatch broke away soundlessly and slowly floated upward into the airless deck above him.

  “Pod deck confirmed depressurized,” he reported. “First element, move up to my position. Second element, stay put at the bottom of Ladderway Beta. Let’s see if anyone’s left in here.”

  In the beams of the team’s helmet lights, two bodies were floating in the pod deck, surrounded by drifting spheres of liquid and pieces of debris. Both dead crew members were in regular shipboard jumpsuits, not EVA gear. One wore the rank of a lieutenant, the other was a midshipman, which meant they had come down from the command deck to get into the escape pods when the ship blew apart. It was only one deck down, but whatever happened had taken place too fast for them to make the pods before the rest of the ship got depressurized.