Vanguard

by Jack Campbell

  Rob saw a patch of light appear on the Bucket’s hull as the outer hatch opened for the warship’s largest air lock amidships. “Follow me,” Rob told the others, trying to sound calm and authoritative, aiming for what even this close looked like a far-too-small target against the immensity of space. Knowing that any hesitation on his part would unnerve his boarding party, he took a deep breath and jumped off.

  Despite his own experience, his inbred planetary instincts kept insisting that either he must be slowing down due to air resistance and gravity as he crossed the one-hundred-meter gap of emptiness, or increasing speed as if he were falling. The last thing his mind wanted to accept was that he was gliding along at an unvarying rate, the side of the Bucket growing steadily larger.

  He felt an absurd sense of accomplishment as he reached the Bucket close enough to the air lock to grab onto the side of it as he hit the other ship with a bit more force than he had planned on.

  Rob looked back, reaching out to grab other members of the boarding party as they came flying toward him. Some of the impacts when they slammed into him were hard enough to cause bruises, but everyone made it safely even though a few hit the side of the Bucket and had to stick, then crawl along to the air lock using the gecko gloves on their survival suits.

  The Bucket’s air lock could only hold ten at a time. Rob sent Val Tanaka through with the first ten, hanging on to the side of the warship and hoping the crew wouldn’t figure out what was happening despite their sensors being hacked. “How’s it look, Ninja?”

  “The guys on the bridge are seriously upset, but they’re still trying to fix what they think is a main-propulsion control problem,” she told him. “Do you want an audio feed? Their captain isn’t too good at swearing, but he makes up in volume for what he lacks in variety.”

  “No, I’m good. Nobody suspects what we’re doing?”

  “One of the other officers is trying to tell the captain that it’s really suspicious they came to a stop relative to us, but nobody is listening because it looks to them like they’re still fifty kilometers from us. Oh, hell, she’s trying to run a diagnostic on the other systems on the ship. I need to deal with that. Talk to you later.”

  “Thanks. The air lock is cycling open. I’m going in.”

  The air lock was a tight fit with ten of them inside. It ambled through its cycle at a sluggish pace, but Rob finally led the rest of the boarding party into the ship, into a nondescript passageway running fore and aft. Without consciously thinking about it, his eyes ran across the nearby piping, conduits, auto-sealing vents, fire suppression features, and other equipment, evaluating how well they had been maintained and kept clean. Not up to Alfar fleet standards but good enough as far as he could tell from the brief scan.

  “Everyone arm your shockers and ensure the safeties are off. Make sure you don’t point them at anyone else in this boarding party! Like we planned,” he told Val. “Go.” She gestured to nine others, and that group headed aft for the power core control compartment. Neither she nor Rob had ever been on a Bucket before, but the standard deck plans for a Buccaneer Class cutter had been available in the colony’s vast database, and the route on such a small ship hadn’t been too hard to memorize.

  Rob turned toward the bow, leading the remaining nine members of the boarding party still with him toward the bridge buried inside the ship farther forward.

  They hadn’t gone more than five meters before reaching an airtight hatch sloppily left open during what should have been a combat readiness situation. At the same moment, two crew members of the Bucket arrived on the other side, coming aft. The crew members were actually jumping through the hatch before they realized Rob and the others were standing there, and barely had time to begin to stare in disbelief before a half dozen shockers went off, the impacts of the charges knocking the two flying before they hit the edges of the hatch and fell unconscious.

  “Didn’t you tell us they’d be wearing survival suits, Lieutenant?” one of the men with Rob asked.

  “They should be,” Rob said. “But they’re so confident that they’re ignoring basic precautions. That’s good for us.”

  Their route had been planned to go past the local control station for the Bucket’s pulse particle cannon. Rob led the group in a rush to the hatch giving access, finding it, too, hanging open and four crew members lounging around the powered-up weapon consoles as they traded jokes. Their survival suits lay draped across the backs of their seats.

  Rob didn’t give them a chance to give up. Too much depended on speed and silence. He and the rest of his team fired, and the four weapons crew members jerked and fell as multiple shocker charges hit each of them.

  “That’s going to hurt,” one of the boarding party commented.

  “Maybe it’ll hurt enough that they’ll realize they need to wear their survival suits in a potential combat situation next time,” Rob replied. He waited impatiently for the few seconds required for those of his party who were members of the colony police force to expertly and swiftly bind the hands and legs of the unconscious crew. “Elliot and Singh, you two stay here and make sure no one else from the crew shows up and tries to use that cannon. Seal the hatch and use the panel here to see anyone who tries to open it.”

  “Got it,” both Elliot and Singh replied.

  Rob led the remaining members of his group back out into the passageway, heading forward, then almost immediately inward toward the bridge. Worry nagged at him, that he had taken a wrong turn or misread something, but then he spotted a ready response compartment just where it should be if he was on the right route.

  Six more crew members were lying around the ready response compartment, supposedly prepared to rush out and reinforce or fix any place or anything that needed either. But the six were all engrossed in whatever was on their individual handhelds, none of them noticing the arrival of Rob and his team until shock charges knocked them out and fried their handhelds.

  As these six had their hands and legs bound, Rob looked around the compartment and saw something with familiar markings that had probably been standardized on Old Earth centuries before. “That’s an arms locker. One of these guys might have a key to it.” It would take time to search for that key, if any of these crew members had been entrusted with one. Time they couldn’t spare. But if the locker contained anything useful . . . Rob hesitated, trying to decide.

  “They might have some good hand weapons in there,” one of Rob’s team suggested.

  “We don’t know that,” Rob said, making up his mind, “and even if they do, and even if we can find a key fast, that locker door might be alarmed so the bridge would know if we opened it. Our best weapon is still surprise.”

  He paused again, not happy at the idea of further diminishing the size of his force but knowing he couldn’t leave these crew members and an arms locker unguarded. “Safwat and Watson, you two stay here,” he ordered. “That arms locker has to be watched. Don’t hesitate to use your shockers again on any other crew members who come by, or any of these six who wake up and cause any trouble.”

  Rob gripped his shocker tightly as he ran the final stretch to the bridge through empty passageways, followed closely by the five other boarding party members left with him. There was the hatch to the bridge, helpfully identified by absurdly ornate letters spelling BRIDGE that had been painted above it. He nodded to the five with him, then tugged at the hatch, cursing as he discovered that it was locked. Finally, someone on this ship had done something right, and just where it was least needed.

  “Ninja?” he called over the coordination circuit. His signal shouldn’t be able to transmit through the warship’s hull, but if Ninja had control of the Bucket’s internal comm system she might be able to—

  “Whatcha need?” Ninja called back. “Oh, got a locked hatch?”

  Spotting the tiny red light that marked the active surveillance camera by the bridge hatch, Rob nodded t
oward it, knowing that Ninja must be remotely controlling that system as well. “What are things like on the bridge? Can you see there?”

  “Yeah. The captain is still screaming at everybody, and everybody is looking at him because if they look away, he screams at them personally. He’s wearing a sidearm. I don’t think it’s a shocker, so don’t take any chances with him.”

  “Understood. Thanks. Can you pop the lock on this hatch?”

  “Stand by. Three, two, one, go.”

  Rob tugged again, and the hatch swung open.

  He led his team onto the bridge. As Ninja had reported, everyone on the bridge was standing at attention and facing inward toward the captain, who was so busy yelling at them all that he didn’t even notice Rob’s arrival.

  Rob aimed and fired his shocker.

  The captain’s latest angry shout changed to a strangled garble as the charge hit and knocked him senseless into the nearest other member of the bridge crew.

  A woman officer spun to look, one hand reaching for where her sidearm would have been holstered. But she broke off the motion as if realizing she didn’t have a weapon and raised her open hands in surrender. The others on the bridge also raised their hands, staring at Rob in disbelief.

  “Are you the second-in-command?” Rob asked the female officer, using his survival suit’s external speaker.

  She shook her head. “The captain sent him back to engineering to yell at the techs there.”

  “Ninja? Can you tell how Val Tanaka is doing?” Rob asked.

  “She’s got the power core,” Ninja confirmed. “They just knocked out some officer who came charging in as if he were being chased by rabid dogs. Here. I’ll link you through the ship’s internal comms.”

  “Val?”

  “Here. We’re in full control, but I’d recommend getting that Torres character aboard so he can fix up the controls on the power core. One of the guys with me, Snee, has a little experience with gear like this, and what he can see of their control setup has him scared. Yeah, I see, Snee. Duct tape. Who the hell fixes a power core backup control link with duct tape?” she asked Rob.

  “I’ve seen stranger uses of duct tape,” Rob said. “But I agree with Snee. We’ll bring the Bucket in closer to Wingnut and get some reinforcements aboard.”

  The female officer was gazing at Rob with a wondering expression. “How the hell did you jump fifty kilometers?”

  “We hacked your sensors,” Rob said. “You’re actually only a hundred meters from our ship.”

  “Oh. I thought the problem was a lot bigger than it looked, but Cap’n Pete was too busy yelling at us to fix things to listen to what we thought might be broken.” She sighed. “If you have the power core and the bridge, we’ve lost. What do you intend doing with the crew?”

  Rob shook his head. “That’s up to the colony council, but I assume we’ll put you all aboard the Wingate and let her carry you back to her next destination. I don’t know what they’ll do with you there, but as long as you never come back here, I don’t care.”

  “All right. Let me use the general announcing system, and I’ll tell everyone aboard to surrender. There’s no sense anyone else’s getting hurt.”

  One of Rob’s group had removed the captain’s sidearm. “Look at this, Lieutenant. Ground forces issue. Anybody he hit with this would have been badly wounded or killed. These guys weren’t playing around.”

  Rob gave the woman officer a hard look. “How many colonies have you guys shaken down for protection money?”

  “I don’t know,” she replied. “This is my first run with them. I got recruited out of Earth Fleet by a bunch of assurances that turned out to be as worthless as a Red’s promise.”

  “Earth Fleet?” Rob asked, startled and looking at her with new eyes.

  “Yeah, I’m former Ensign Danielle Martel of Earth Fleet, now a former lieutenant in Scatha’s fleet because you just gave me a chance to get out of a bad contract.” She shook her head at him. “You should know that Scatha isn’t going to be happy about this.”

  “Too bad,” Rob said. “We’ve got this ship, and we’ll use it if they try anything else.”

  “Do you really think this is over? Scatha has two other warships, both better than this one, and its leaders are not nice people. Ever since I got to Scatha, I’ve been hearing pronouncements from those leaders about how Scatha is going to be a new Earth but with teeth. They want what they call order and safety, and to do that they intend to be the big dog in this region of space, whether the neighboring star systems want it or not. You’d better be planning on how to handle whatever they try next.”

  Rob gave Danielle Martel a grim look, the glow of victory fading within him. This had just been the first skirmish in what looked to be a war rather than an isolated raid.

  “Can’t Old Earth do something?” Ninja asked over the comm circuit.

  “Not out here,” Rob replied. “Not anymore. We’re on our own.”

  • • •

  Many light years away from the star now named Glenlyon, Carmen Ochoa stood glaring out a window at an ancient landscape that countless other human eyes had looked upon. “Earth was the center of the universe. Now, we’re irrelevant.”

  Her boss favored Carmen with a weary look. “What is it now?”

  She kept her gaze on the scene outside. An impact crater from the First Solar War still marked the site of the original spaceport outside of Albuquerque, the new port spreading out to the south. Clusters of trees and closely trimmed grass designed to reclaim battered land provided welcome carpets of color. The remnants of the old city, and the newer structures built to look like early structures and so strangely seeming older than the original buildings, filled the valley beyond the port and the crater. Beyond them, rough mountains and hills rose toward a daytime sky that had looked down uncaring on human activities for thousands of years.

  Make the low-lying sun a lot smaller, make the mountains and hills a little redder, and it would look very much like the sort of landscapes that Carmen had grown up seeing on Mars. The buildings, though . . . not like here at all. Put up in a rush, on foundations of idealism that proved to be as sturdy as shifting sand, sagging under the burdens of age, makeshift repairs, and the voracious dust of Mars. Unbidden, Carmen’s mind summoned up memories from when she was little, huddled into one corner of a small room hiding from gang battles outside, or from the searching eyes of gang recruiters.

  Promising herself that someday she would keep other places from ending up like Mars had. Doing whatever she had to in order to make it off Mars and to the one place that had the power to make a difference.

  As if to mock that old vow, from here a large piece of public art was visible, globes shining reddish golden in the sunlight fixed to swooping, silvery metal shafts. In the center hung the globe representing Sol, the sun of Earth. Spreading outward in an irregular sphere were the other globes, each marking a star where humanity had planted colonies.

  Old Earth, it was called now, and those colony worlds were increasingly known as the Old Colonies as new worlds were settled after the explosion of humanity into space as the new jump drives made interstellar travel much faster and easier. The sculpture was obsolete, a relic of the past. Like her job. “I am thinking,” Carmen said, “that I just wasted more of my time and effort for nothing.”

  Her boss shrugged. “You got the cease-and-desist order approved and sent.”

  “Yeah. You know what’s funny? When ships tried to push light speed and spent years getting to one of the Old Colonies or back to Earth, they listened to Earth. They respected Earth. But now that ships can use jump space to make the same journey within weeks, the Old Colonies pay less and less attention to Earth.”

  Another shrug. “Nothing funny about it,” her boss said. “Familiarity breeds contempt. When we were the incredibly distant home that took years to reach, we were wrapped in
myth and memory. But when anybody can get from there to here in a few weeks? Then we’re just another planet, one with dozens and dozens of independent governments ruling independent states that often refuse to cooperate. A planet that has seen a lot more mistakes and stupidity than any of the Old Colonies have gotten around to yet.”

  Carmen shook her head. “Everyone is talking about how much smaller the galaxy is with jump drives. But it took four months for that request for a cease-and-desist to reach us, on ships jumping from star to star, then four more months for me to work it through the bureaucracy and get the order approved, and it will take another four months for that order to get back to the star Derribar, where a colony has now existed for eight months. And what will happen when the colony at Derribar presents that cease-and-desist order to the nearly-as-new colony at Cathal? Nothing. Because Cathal knows they can ignore it. Assuming that in the year since the request was first made by Derribar that it hasn’t already been overtaken by events.”

  “What do you want, Ochoa?” her boss asked. “For Earth to build a fleet big enough to force colonies in a sphere hundreds of light years across to do what we want?”

  “I know that’s impossible, even if enough of the governments in the solar system agreed on something like that.” Carmen gritted her teeth. “You know that I grew up on Mars. I saw firsthand how ugly things can get when there is no such thing as effective government or respect for law.”

  “And, for a Red, you’re a really decent person. But most of the Reds seem to like it that ugly, at least until their terraformed ecology begins to collapse again due to neglect and they beg the organized governments on Earth to step in and fix it.” Her boss sighed. “Humanitarian crises shouldn’t be so predictable.”

  “You’re a really decent person . . . for a Red.” Even her boss on Earth couldn’t forget where she had come from. “I didn’t like it that ugly. So I left to try to make things better. And instead, it’s happening all over again! Just like when Mars was colonized, only this time it’s happening on countless worlds. The sheep are scattering in pursuit of places with no shepherds, and the wolves are sharpening their knives.” Carmen shook her head, turning away from the window. “I can’t make any difference here. I’m resigning. Heading out. Maybe out there I can do something that matters.”