by Terry Mixon
“On that note, I have someone you need to talk to,” Saburo replied. “Can we get a private channel?”
Even using laser relays, communication across the cluster was getting problematic. They’d need to drop the jamming field sooner rather than later.
Brad tapped a few commands on his wrist-comp, slicing the channel down to just him and Saburo. He was alone in his office already, so at least he didn’t need to remove anyone on his end.
“We’re secure,” he told Saburo.
“Good. Brad Madrid, meet General Nadya Abreu,” Saburo replied as he expanded his view and gestured for another person to enter the camera feed.
From the way the handcuffed woman shuffled over to him, she’d only just been escorted into the room. At some point in the fighting the woman had been shot in the shoulder, the wound clearly expertly treated and bandaged—but her eyes were cold and fierce.
“Admiral Madrid, I am the senior commanding officer of the Outer Worlds Army forces deployed to this cluster,” she said formally. “This fight has already been a nightmare that has cost far more of my soldiers and officers than I prefer.”
She shook her head.
“What little information I have suggests that the…other facility in this region has already fallen,” she said calmly.
“You mean the Warren’s Folly refueling and logistics base?” Brad asked.
Abreu slumped a bit. She’d clearly assumed that, but dancing around the name had been the bone she’d thrown out in case she’d been wrong.
“Yes. If Warren’s Folly has fallen, then our presence in this cluster has failed,” she said bluntly. “My minder is dead, but I have facilities and personnel scattered across this cluster.”
“If you wish to minimize losses, I can drop the jamming so you can order them to surrender,” Brad offered.
“That won’t work,” she replied sadly. “Some of the smaller contingents will obey, but the senior officers have their minders. Their…commissars, let’s call them. They don’t have a title, but we know their role.
“Any of my officers who attempts to obey a surrender order will be shot,” Abreu said flatly. “Only the fact that you are jamming everything would stop those commissars from ordering their families murdered.
“If you’re prepared to trust anything I say, I can give you a list of the positions that are held solely by commandos and the positions that I believe do not have commissars. The latter should surrender on my command…and the former will never surrender.”
“The ones in between we’re going to have to dig out,” Brad said grimly.
“Yes.” Abreu sighed. “I can tell you where the command facilities are. If you hit those first and remove the commissars and senior command, my regulars should then follow my orders to surrender.”
“Why should we trust you?” Brad demanded.
“You don’t have a single Everdarkened reason to,” she snapped. “And I have nothing I can say to convince you to trust me, either. I have a wife and two kids on Triton, Admiral, and I never signed up to have them held hostage against my good behavior!”
Brad studied her face. He had no way to confirm or deny anything she said—except, possibly, by testing some of the “should surrenders” on her list.
Something in her eyes told him she was telling the truth, though, and he forced a smile.
“If your family is at risk, General, then I think the official record is going to show you as KIA,” he told her gently. “Until things have calmed down enough that someone is in control of Triton that we can trust not to hurt your kids, at least.
“Send us your information, General. We’ll do everything we can.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
“So far, the General’s assessment has come out perfectly,” Saburo reported. “Seven minor settlements have surrendered without a fight, and the three we assaulted based on her intel were guarded by commandos.”
He shook his head.
“Those were bad, Brad,” he noted. “We lost good people, but from what Abreu said, we’re basically done with the commandos here.”
“I’ll be happy when we’re done with them completely,” Brad said grimly. “I’m guessing it was a commando—or one of these ‘commissars’—who pulled the trigger on Istantinople. We’re still looking for survivors, but…”
“Those stations are designed to break up and protect some people when hit by a meteor or something,” Saburo told him. “They’re not designed to survive a nuclear bomb.”
“I know. But we have to try.”
“It’s been thirty-six hours. How likely are you to find anyone?”
“Not very,” Brad admitted. “But there were fifty-two thousand people on that station.”
“And the OWA killed them. Not you.” Saburo’s voice was hard.
“My brother,” the Admiral replied.
“If you want to paint yourself in the blood of your brother’s crimes, you’re going to need a bigger brush,” the mercenary snapped. “Now, I’m not an expert on Fleet deployments, but I can tell you that we’re not going to need anything heavier than a corvette to deal with what’s left of the cluster. So long as the jamming is up, we have the upper hand.”
“Are you suggesting I should get moving?” Brad asked.
“Yes,” his old friend told him. “We don’t need you here, and we might well need you at Jupiter.”
Brad sighed and looked at the screen pretending to be a window. Somewhere out in the debris field Incredible was orbiting was whatever was left of Commodore Branson, a man who’d done him more than one favor over the years. Getting the man vaporized seemed like a poor repayment.
“Evidence suggests that I might be best off well away from anything,” he replied. “This whole operation was a wreck, and the responsibility for that stops here.”
He stabbed his thumb into his chest.
“A wreck,” Saburo repeated back to him. “You took out an equivalent OWN force without a single ship lost or even significantly damaged. You captured multiple OWA senior officers yourself to stop them escaping. We may have lost Istantinople, but we’ve already liberated a quarter million people.
“That’s…a fucking glorious victory by most people’s standards, boss. If you want to kick yourself over that, you’re not going to find many people to help provide the boot.”
Brad snorted.
“Doesn’t feel like it from this chair,” he pointed out. “We’ve lost, what, two thousand Marines and mercenaries in the ops so far?”
“Yeah. And that fucking sucks,” Saburo agreed. “But that’s war. Even we’d never really seen war before, Brad, and it fucking sucks.”
“I’ll move Incredible out of the jamming field and get an update from Jupiter,” Brad promised. “There are ships out there that knew to come in and find me if anything critical came up, but you’re right. I need to be back in the loop, not obsessing over one lost battle.”
“Branson was a good man, and we’ll mourn him,” his friend said gently. “But right now, Admiral, you have a war to win. We’ll send the Oaths with you. They’re overkill for this job now, and someone’s got to watch your back.
“Isn’t that Michelle’s job?” Brad asked.
“Yup. And the moment I tell her you need her more than I do, she’ll be gone so fast, we’ll think she invented FTL!” Saburo replied.
Brad chuckled. It was a sad, halfhearted thing, but it was real at least.
“Thank you,” he said quietly, then considered for a long moment.
“I’m going to need you, too,” he decided sharply. “Transfer command to Papadakis and get your ass on one of the Oaths. We have the beginnings of a plan to deal with the Phoenix, and I’m going to need the best fighters I’ve got for it.”
The response from his subordinates at Jupiter arrived in astonishing time. Just the round-trip time for a radio message was the better part of half an hour, but he had a response from Bailey in roughly forty-five minutes.
“It’s good to know
the man technically in charge of this shitshow is still alive,” she opened without preamble. “I’ve got a handle on the Fleet side of things, but the Jovian militias are getting real grumpy taking orders from even a Martian Squadron vet. Anybody from inside the asteroid belt is running uphill here, Madrid.
“We need you. It’s not critical yet, things are trucking along so far, but we’re getting pretty close to the point where you’re going to need to smack some heads together.”
She shook her own head.
“And the intel we’re getting out of Saturn is ugly. I don’t think we’ve got more than two weeks, maybe three, before the OWN makes their move. We’re going to need those cruisers you ran away with before they get here.
“So, yeah. You needed to go, I get that…but we need you here. Not right this second, if there’s still crap you need to clean up behind that jamming field of yours, but sooner rather than later.”
The recording ended and Brad couldn’t help smiling at the usual abrasiveness of his senior Fleet subordinate.
He checked the last set of reports from inside the jamming and found himself nodding. Abreu’s intel had been the final piece of the puzzle and everything was falling into place. He couldn’t pretend the rest of the operation in the cluster was going to be easy or clean—and certainly not bloodless!—but it didn’t need him or the heavy warships anymore.
“Captain Nah.” He opened a channel to the bridge. “I’m guessing that tagging our main concentrations in the cluster with lasers is still a sucker’s game?”
“I can probably get the other two cruisers,” she told him. “That’s all I can promise you.”
“Let’s not risk it. Courier drones,” Brad concluded. “Cruisers, destroyers, and every second corvette are to report to Incredible’s current location inside twenty-four hours.
“The Lord Protector is making noises towards Jupiter, which means it’s time for us to go back to the main war and show him why he should never have started this fight!”
Brad had barely finished giving those orders when the admittance chime on his office sounded.
“Enter.”
He wasn’t expecting Michelle to step into the room. The Oaths had already met Incredible outside the jamming zone, the mercenary destroyers forming a protective triangle around the cruiser, but he’d thought she was still aboard Oath of Vengeance.
“Oh, good, people did play along,” she told him brightly as she hopped up onto his desk. “Saburo said you were having a rough few days.”
“You saw the casualty reports,” Brad replied. “And Istantinople.”
“And I really, really want to kill the son of a bitch who decided that political commissars with suicide bombs were a good solution to controlling a cluster, yes,” she confirmed. “I believe he goes by Lord Protector these days.”
That got an unexpected chuckle out of Brad.
“You weren’t responsible for the op, though,” he pointed out. “None of those people would be dead if I hadn’t decided to move here.”
“And First Fleet would have had half a cruiser squadron fly up our tailpipes in the battle for Jupiter,” Michelle told him. “We needed to deploy. We needed to clean this mess up. I won’t let you beat up my husband for that.”
“I swear that someone else could have done better,” he said quietly, admitting his worst fear. “I’m a mercenary, Michelle. A blade master, a pistoleer, a small force commander. What the hell am I doing in command of a fleet?”
“Based off the fact that your crews, mercenary and Commonwealth alike, are starting to think you’re an unbeatable god who walks on water?” she asked. “I’d say you’re doing okay.”
He snorted.
“I’ve got too many of them killed to buy that,” he told her.
“You, my love, need to stop sitting in your office, beating yourself up,” Michelle told him. “Conveniently, your wife is aboard and she has much better ideas of what to do with your time!”
Brad wasn’t sure how long they’d been asleep before a hideous klaxon echoed through his quarters. The sound woke both him and Michelle up, but it took him a good several seconds to realize it wasn’t coming from any of the ship’s systems or alerts.
The klaxon was coming from his wrist-comp, an emergency signal that was overriding half a dozen do-not-disturb lockouts to get his attention.
Somehow, he wasn’t surprised it was an Agency override.
“Brad, this message is priority one, alpha, omega, whatever the fuck tag you want to hang on it,” Kate Falcone’s voice echoed through the room as he hit acknowledge.
“That itch between my shoulder blades was right. More than right. Hades and her escorts are moving in to deal with an OWA facility now, but we were too late.
“They had a bunch of crude missile launchers set up, and they were going to use the fuel from Warren’s Folly to get them closer to their target, but once they’d confirmed the Folly had fallen, they simply launched from where they were.
“I’m attaching every piece of data I have on the damn missiles they fired, but I can’t intercept them from here. I think you can…and you have to.”
Falcone paused, and he heard her swallow in the recording.
“They duplicated the dirty nukes from the Ceres attack, and they launched them at Ganymede,” she said levelly. “They’re coming in ballistic now and they might lose a few, given the distance, but if they get even half a dozen warheads into the seas of Ganymede…they’ll poison the water supply for the entire Jupiter System.
“You have to stop them.”
The message ended and Brad stared at his wrist for several long seconds.
“There are alternative water supplies,” Michelle pointed out—but she was already dressing.
“Even ignoring that millions will die if they nuke Ganymede, switching to those supplies will take time,” Brad reminded her. “Time in which people will die.”
He had barely even been aware that he was dressing until Michelle leaned in to straighten his stars and kiss his cheek.
“Then we better get to the bridge and feed that vector data to Captain Nah,” she told him. “Because I’m with you, love.
“We stopped this kind of bullshit once before. We’ll do it again. I promise.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
Four ships burned through space at their maximum acceleration, and Brad stood next to his seat on Incredible’s flag deck.
The three Vikings destroyers had been sent out to “escort” Incredible as an excuse to put him and his wife on the same ship. The only thing that didn’t make that an abuse of authority in Brad’s mind was that he hadn’t been involved in that decision at all.
He was grateful they were there now.
“We have confirmation, sir,” Captain Nah told him. “Ajax, Achilles, Hammerhead and Whaleshark will all be able to rendezvous with us before we intercept the salvo.”
Those four ships were two-thirds of the corvettes that Brad had positioned outside the jamming field as relays. Two Invictus-class ships and two Shark-class ships. It wasn’t much—but it was four more hulls, and hulls were going to be key to this task.
“Do we have any way of confirming the presence of the missiles?” Brad asked. “I trust Falcone, but if we can narrow down their location, it will help the intercept.”
Nah shook her head.
“From the data the Agency sent us, the missiles went ballistic after about ten minutes,” she told him. “We have a good idea of where they are, but we won’t be able to detect them at anything above about five hundred thousand kilometers.
“At that point, we’ll be able to adjust our courses to intercept, but…”
“But we’re going after relatively small targets that are moving damn fast,” Brad agreed. “The good news is that they won’t be dodging. They burned their fuel to get away from Falcone.”
He leaned over his chair and plugged numbers into his repeater screens.
“I make our intercept at impact minus twenty-two hou
rs, with almost sixty hours after that for us to make Jupiter orbit in a controlled fashion,” he said aloud. “Any brilliant ideas on the course, Captain?”
“If we try to match the velocities any closer, we risk losing them in the chaos of Jupiter’s traffic, rings, and satellites.”
“We passed all of the data on to Bailey and Buckley?” he asked.
“As soon as you forwarded it to us,” Nah confirmed. “They should have it already and be able to pre-position ships. Any intercept of these things is going to suck.”
Brad nodded absently. The data he had suggested weapons identical in purpose to the bombs the Cadre had tried to poison Ceres with a few months before. Major drives attached to a wickedly pointed tip, with a nuclear bomb in the middle coated in tungsten and strontium.
If a single weapon punched through the ice on Ganymede, it would detonate and poison the water for hundreds of kilometers in any direction. Even one bomb would require massive cleanup and safety efforts, even though they would probably be able to keep anyone from running out of water.
Multiple bombs would render the entire moon’s water supply functionally unusable.
“What about the rest of the task force, sir?” Nah asked quietly. “There’s still a pile of ships running around the trailing Trojans.”
“Send a com drone in,” Brad replied. “Major Papadakis is to retain as many ships as she feels are necessary to complete the mission. The rest are to make their best speed back to Jupiter.
“I imagine the bombs were supposed to launch at the meteor swarm’s closest approach to Jupiter, in about a month. With that attack short-circuited, the Phoenix is almost certainly going to decide he’s done playing.”
“Yes, sir.”
And if Jack Mantruso had another string to his bow, Brad wasn’t sure he could hang around to see what it was. More and more, it was starting to look like defending Jupiter was giving up the initiative to an enemy with a giant bag of dirty tricks.
