by Marko Kloos
She approached the fallen gunmen with her rifle at the ready. They were wearing medium hardshell armor suits with ballistic liners underneath, just like her own section. The armor was of a style she didn’t recognize, but it looked modern and in excellent shape. If she had told her section to gear up like they had done for the escort mission yesterday, their small-caliber submachine guns would not have been enough to punch through that armor reliably, and she would have been dead on the floor in the first few moments of the attack.
Shakya didn’t waste time making the trip around the reflecting pool. He just stepped over the chipped retaining wall and walked through the hip-high water, then climbed out on her side, his rifle never wavering from its aiming point somewhere between the two nearest dead attackers.
“Fuckers came geared for a massacre,” Shakya said. “Looks like they didn’t expect to end up in an infantry battle.”
“Well, they got one,” Idina said. “Now let’s get the hells out of here before the place falls down around us.”
On the other side of the pool, Dahl stood up, her gun still in her hand and held at low ready. She looked a little shaken, but not as rattled as Idina would have felt in her spot, wearing only a light ballistic skin suit and carrying a service pistol with ammo that was only good for soft targets.
“We got them,” Idina called out to her.
Somewhere inside the building, a burst of automatic fire rang out, then another. A few quick single shots followed in reply. The Red Section troopers reoriented themselves to face the direction of the new threat. Dahl checked her pistol and started rushing toward the sound of the gunfire.
“Wait,” Idina shouted.
Dahl stopped and looked back at her.
“Bad idea,” Idina said. “You’re not geared for that fight.”
“That is my job,” Dahl replied. “I have to do it. No matter how I happen to be geared.”
Idina looked over at Corporal Shakya.
“Sounds like the massacre’s still in progress,” she said. “Want to go even the odds a bit?”
Shakya shrugged and checked the ammunition status of his rifle.
“Might as well. Beats walking perimeter patrol.”
They gathered around Dahl, who looked slight among all the armored troopers even though she was taller than most of them. Somewhere in the bowels of the station, there was more gunfire, handguns trading shots with military rifles.
“If you are sure about this, then let us not waste time,” Dahl said.
They moved out toward the sound of the gunfire together.
CHAPTER 19
DUNSTAN
“It is a pretty ship,” Lieutenant Armer said. “I’ve always had a thing for those Acheroni-built composite hulls. That one must have cost a bundle.”
They were looking at a viewscreen that showed a close-up image of Zephyr’s bow section. The little speed yacht had flipped around for her deceleration burn a few hours ago, and her drive plume was no longer obstructing the direct view of her hull. Even at ten thousand kilometers, the optical sensors combined with Hecate’s otherworldly AI gave them such a clear image that they could count and identify all her antenna arrays and sensor bulges.
“It’s light, and it’s fast,” Lieutenant Robson said. “But it’s almost all graphene matrix and a composite skin. They’re brave to take that ship where they’re taking it. If they take a hit from anything more powerful than a socaball, they’ll crumple like a paper lantern.”
“Speed is armor,” Dunstan interjected from the command chair. “That’s what they teach at the space warfare command school, you know. If they can’t hit you, it doesn’t matter how thick your hull is.”
Lieutenant Hunter shook her head with a smile.
“With all due respect, sir, but that’s old-school talk. If we really needed to blow that ship out of space right now? I would let Armer use fifty percent of the AI core capacity for the gun mount. The AI would calculate two trillion aim lead points per second. Unless they can travel back in time, we’d have them shot in half with the first ten-round burst.”
“Old-school talk,” Dunstan said. “You’re saying it’s pre-Dreadnought thinking.”
She rewarded the reference with a grin.
“Pre-Dreadnought thinking. Exactly.”
Hecate was in a precise pursuit trajectory controlled by the navigation AI. They were following in Zephyr’s shadow to keep what little thermal emissions the warship’s stealth nozzle dissipated hidden behind the much larger thermal bloom from the civilian ship’s drive. If someone in the target zone were to look their way, they would only be able to see a single bright flare coming toward them. They were well off any current low-energy transfer lanes. A few ships were on direct brachistochrone trajectories, willing and able to spend the fuel and gravmag energy to make multiple-g runs through the interplanetary space for urgent cargo, but even the closest one of those was a few million kilometers away, lawfully broadcasting its ID and location on the Mnemosyne as it went. If there were other ships in this part of space, they were coasting with their transponders off and their Mnemosyne nodes deactivated. Anyone they would run into out here was likely to be a smuggler or a pirate.
“Decelerating right on the numbers. Thirteen minutes until we cut the burn,” Hunter said. “Prepare to switch to internal heat sinks as soon as the drive shuts down.”
“Prepare for internal heat retention, aye,” Lieutenant Armer replied.
“Tell me again how long those will last,” Dunstan said.
“Depends on our output, sir. With the drive off, it’s just the environmental heat from our bodies, the energy the hull absorbs from the sun, and whatever the core puts out. If we don’t need to fire up our main propulsion, we can go for two or three days before we have to start ejecting heat sinks.”
“Let’s hope we won’t have to hide out here for that long.” Dunstan looked at the situational display. There was nothing special about this corner of interplanetary space, no asteroids or natural anomalies to hide behind. But it was a long way from the regular shipping lanes, and if someone was lying in wait out there, they would see incoming traffic from a long way out.
“Give me a fix on the nearest Alliance unit in the area,” he ordered.
Lieutenant Robson checked her display.
“We have two light cruisers roughly equidistant at three million kilometers. RNS Cerberus and ONS Pelican. At maximum design spec acceleration with deceleration burn factored in, four point three four hours for Cerberus to get here, and four point one four hours for Pelican.”
“Good. We’ll call on them if we need space for prisoners. Any civilian traffic that may get in the way?”
“Negative, sir. The closest commercial traffic is five million kilometers out and burning at five g for Oceana. We have the neighborhood all to ourselves.”
“Very well. Number One, let’s get ready for business. Call the ship to action stations.”
Lieutenant Hunter picked up the hardwired handset for the low-power ship comms.
“Action stations, action stations. All hands to battle positions. Assume vacsuit state alpha. Set EMCON condition one. Ship-to-ship action imminent. This is not a drill.”
Everyone on the operations deck reached for their vacsuit helmet to follow the first officer’s directive. Dunstan put on his own helmet and sealed it to the collar of his pressure suit. If the ship took a hit and their compartment lost atmosphere, the visor of the helmet would seal in a blink and switch his air supply to his seat’s built-in oxygen feed. It was an action he had performed a thousand times or more in his long career, but the simple act of tightening the seal and double-checking it always felt like stepping into a fighting ring, preparing to give someone a bloody nose or receive one.
Now we are just waiting for the bell to ring and the round to start, he thought.
“All hands, prepare for zero-g maneuvering,” Lieutenant Hunter announced ten minutes later. “Main drive shutdown in ten seconds.”
Dunstan felt the familiar lightness in his middle when the ship’s fusion drive throttled back to standby mode. Hecate had a gravmag array like all warships, but stealth mode meant making as little electromagnetic noise as possible, so the ship would remain at zero g while they were drifting silently.
“Main drive is idling,” the helmsman said. “Acceleration zero meters per second squared. Velocity three hundred fifty meters per second.”
“Flip us around,” Hunter ordered. “Sensors, stand by for passive sweep.”
Hecate turned 180 degrees with its dorsal thrusters to point her bow into the direction of travel again. A moment later, the tactical display updated with the feed from the passive sensors. Ten thousand kilometers ahead of Hecate, Zephyr was still decelerating, radiating their thermal signature like a miniature star in the darkness of the interplanetary void. If the fusion-drive plume masked Hecate from the target area, it also worked to shield that portion of space from their passive sensors. Zephyr was plunging down a deep, dark well without knowing what was waiting at the bottom, in a ship that was unarmed and unarmored. Hecate was going in after them, ready to hand down a rope, but there was no way of knowing if they would be able to get there in time to make a difference if things went very wrong.
Revenge is a strong motivator, Dunstan thought. That’s why we are all here, after all. They want to get payback for their dead friend. With all the righteous talk of law and justice, everyone on this ship wants to get retribution for our quarter million dead and wounded. And whoever Odin’s Ravens are, they were justified in their own minds for dropping that nuke. We’re all just kindling new grudges even as we are settling old ones.
“EMCON is under AI control. All sensors are in passive mode. We are rigged for full stealth,” Lieutenant Robson said.
“Zephyr is coming out of her burn as well. Distance is now twelve thousand five hundred kilometers,” Armer reported.
On the tactical screen, the icon for the little Oceanian courier looked lonely all by itself. Unlike Hecate, they hadn’t turned off their active emissions on purpose, and their transponder was sending out the ship’s ID once every second: OMV-2022 ZEPHYR. They wanted to make sure to be seen, to signal to whoever was waiting that they had no subterfuge in mind. A few minutes later, the icon for Zephyr changed to a pulsating orange.
“They’ve turned on their emergency beacon,” Robson said. “Now we wait and see if someone comes to sniff the bait.”
“Well, that didn’t take long,” Lieutenant Hunter said less than an hour later. A new icon had materialized on the tactical screen, eight thousand kilometers off their port bow. “Contact, designate Sultan-1. Heading right for the emergency signal at a quarter-g acceleration.”
“Any chance they’re a random merchie coming to check for a salvage opportunity?” Dunstan asked.
Robson shook her head. “They’re not squawking any ID. We picked them up on passive when they lit their drive. They’ve been parked out here all still and quiet. Probably took the last forty-five minutes to decide if the coast is clear.”
“If that’s just some shady scrapper looking for an easy payday, they’ve picked a bad time and place.”
“This isn’t anywhere near a brachistochrone trajectory between any of the planets right now,” Hunter said. “They have no reason to be out here. Could be that they just happened to be in the area. But that would be a fantastic coincidence.”
Dunstan watched as the icon labeled UNKNOWN steadily moved toward the spot where Zephyr’s emergency beacon was sending out its automated message once every seven seconds. To a passing military ship or an honest merchant, it would constitute an obligation to render assistance. Any ship that was found to have detected an emergency beacon and failed to investigate without a good excuse or explanation was subject to having its operating license pulled and her captain prosecuted. To a freelance scrapper or a pirate, a beacon would represent the possibility of a lucrative wreck to salvage. A claim on a wreck with half a ton of palladium in it could keep a small salvage outfit in the black for a year or two.
On a normal day during a routine patrol, Dunstan would have been happy to bust a scrapper who was coasting dirty, but today he was hoping for much more consequential prey.
For the next twenty minutes, they watched the plot. The unknown ship wasn’t rushing in to snatch the bait. Instead, they reduced their burn, then counterburned to finish the approach to the “crippled” Zephyr on cold-gas thrusters. In the middle of the other ship’s return to a nose-first course, an alarm signal sounded at Lieutenant Robson’s station, and the icon for the unknown ship lit up with new identification and position data.
“They went active on their radar,” Robson said. “Nine-gigahertz band, one and a half kilowatt. That’s commercial civilian gear. Not a military piece of hardware.”
“Checking the neighborhood for lurkers,” Dunstan said. “Any chance at all they’re getting a return from us?”
Robson shook her head.
“Not with that gear at that range, sir. At eight thousand klicks, you couldn’t get a hit from our hull with a good military set at a hundred times the wattage.”
The distance between the newcomer and Zephyr decreased slowly but steadily. Zephyr was playing her part, pretending to be dead in space. They would have picked up the radar sweep from the incoming ship, but Hecate and Zephyr had kept radio silence ever since they’d started their burn many hours ago, so there was no way for Zephyr’s crew to know for sure that Hecate had followed them and was lurking in wait according to plan. Dunstan tried to put himself into the head of the other captain, knowing that someone was coming to steal her ship and probably flush her out of an airlock, and putting her trust in someone who had almost arrested her the only time they’d met.
I don’t know if I would have made that leap of faith in her place, Dunstan thought. Not even for revenge.
On the tactical screen, the icon for the unknown ship changed to a blue lozenge shape, and an ID tag appeared next to the symbol.
“And they just went legit,” Robson said. “They turned on their ID transponder. OMV-1519 Morning Star,” she added, with skepticism in her voice.
“They have to squawk their ID so Zephyr’s logs can pick it up,” Dunstan said. “For salvage claim disputes. First ship to get there gets to make the claim. Check the ID with the Mnemosyne data, please.”
“Already on it, sir.” Robson had a data screen floating next to her console, and her fingers were flying across the input fields. “OMV-1519 Morning Star. Pleasure cruiser, five thousand tons, certified for two hundred passengers. Rhodian built, served as an interplanetary tourism ship until the war. Registry says she was sold to a civilian investor group on Oceana three years ago. The flight plan database says she left Oceana One over four weeks ago.”
“That’s a really long pleasure cruise. Check the drive and EM profiles on file. If that’s the same ship, they’re a long way from home for no good reason.”
“How long before we spring the trap, sir?” Hunter asked.
Dunstan looked at the distance scales on the tactical screen.
“I want to let them know we are here before they get close enough to Zephyr to be able to do something stupid when they realize they are burned. Are we in certain intercept range?”
“If that’s really OMV-1519, they can do five g at the most,” Robson said. “They were in our certain intercept envelope the second we spotted them on passive. If they make a run for it, we’ll be on top of them inside of ten minutes.”
“All right. Let’s spook them. Give me a tight-beam link so we don’t broadcast our presence to the entire neighborhood. Who are we pretending to be?”
Robson thought for a moment while she worked her control screen.
“How about RNS Hades?”
“Hades it is,” Dunstan said.
“Go ahead on tight-beam, sir.”
Dunstan cleared his throat and tapped his comms button.
“Attention, Morning Star. This is the Rho
dian Navy ship Hades. Are you receiving us?”
Lieutenant Hunter flashed a wry grin. Anyone whose comms array just got hit by a focused comms laser knew good and well that the sending party was aware of their presence and exact location. They would not be able to remain silent and feign ignorance unless they pretended their comms gear was broken, and every skipper knew that failure to answer a navy challenge would result in seeing the challenging ship come alongside in short order. The other option was to turn and flee, but that was tantamount to admitting illegal activity.
“Hades, this is Morning Star. We receive you loud and clear, but we don’t have you on our sensors.”
“We are nearby, Morning Star. You want to explain why you are cruising through interplanetary space without a valid transponder squawk?”
“Hades, our transponder is on and broadcasting. We are on course to reply to an emergency beacon off our bow. Are you transmitting that signal?”
“He knows good and damn well that the tight-beam is coming from somewhere else,” Hunter said.
“He’s weighed his options and decided to feign ignorance,” Dunstan replied. “He knows he’s fucked now. But he doesn’t want to turn and run because he doesn’t know if we can catch him.”
Dunstan tapped his comms button again.
“That is a negative, Morning Star. Maintain course and bring your velocity to under ten meters per second. We will be alongside shortly for an inspection.”
“Hades, copy. Any reason for the inspection? We were just checking on that emergency beacon.”
“Morning Star, let’s just save each other time and drop the pretense. You only turned on your transponder five minutes ago. We’ve been tracking you for a while.”
“That must be a sensor malfunction on your end, Hades. We’ve been squawking proper ID since we left the station. We have our ship’s autolog to back us up. But go ahead and do your inspection. We’ve got nothing to hide. Maintaining course and reducing velocity as ordered.”
Dunstan looked over at Lieutenant Hunter, who raised an eyebrow.
