by Tim C Taylor
“Order a mass revival of the sleeper pods,” she instructed Spartika.
“How many?”
Nhlappo laughed. “I don’t think you’ve grasped the seriousness of the situation, Major. I want you to revive all of them.”
— Chapter 32 —
Janna couldn’t take it anymore. “For God’s sake, will you two quit whining? You’re crapping yourselves over nothing. Grow a pair, already.”
Tennyson pretended he couldn’t hear, but Shinzo had kept his cool enough to answer. “The data network has been severely compromised. We’re low priority which is why we’ve lost comms altogether.”
“So? We get a little peace and quiet. We’ve got several days’ emergency air. They’ll pick us up. Anyway, I’m the one who should be whining. You’re in Marine battlesuits with butt tubes and dick suckers to keep you heroes clean. My emergency pressure suit hasn’t any of that fancy plumbing. When I need to go–”
“Yeah, we get it,” said Shinzo waving his hand dismissively as if he could delete her with a simple hand gesture. “The point is not that we keep losing comms, but that the Hardits are trying to disrupt our command and control. That should worry you more that your frakking hygiene concerns.”
Janna bared her teeth at the Marine idiot and turned away before she punched him – not a good idea considering his battle armor. Of course she realized they were in deep shit. But rather than let her distract them from their worries, they chose to regard her as an imbecile.
After all, she was only a Wolf.
Fuckers.
The screen on Janna’s wrist lit up. Relief flowed through her like a honeyed balm when she glanced down and recognized Romulus’s face grinning up at her. The deep brown of his eyes twinkled against the lighter tan and russet swirls of his parasite-hardened skin.
She touched the hard swirl of infected skin on her own cheek… and then felt such a moron because her helmet was in the way.
“I’ll kiss your beauty patch later, honey,” laughed Romulus. “Promise. But there’s a bit of a flap going on. We’re heading out.”
“Out? Out system?” Panic prickled at Janna’s skin. Shinzo and Tennyson stopped what they were doing and looked up at her, trying to eavesdrop.
“Yeah. We’re packing up and leaving. Look, I gotta hang up. Things to do. Just wanted to let you know it’s more than just me who’s thinking of you. A shuttle will come pick you up soon.”
Why were the ships leaving? What the hell was going on?
So many questions tugged at her, but she needed to let her lover go do his job. “I’ll see you back at the ranch, Rom. Janna out.”
Romulus could take an age to say goodbye. She reached for the wrist unit of her suit to cut him off.
“Don’t go!”
She stayed her hand. Romulus’s face shifted one side to make space for another caller, his brother Remus. Romulus’s face reminded her of the beautiful bivalve shells that washed onto the islands of Littoran. His brother’s face pattern was dappled shades of violet and indigo, perfect camouflage for the woods of Tranquility where the she-wolf, the mother ginquin, had briefly fostered Romulus and Remus when babies.
“Hello, Janna.”
“Butt out, brother,” yelled Romulus. “This is a private conversation with my girlfriend.”
“Shut your dumb mouth and listen. Both of you. I’m sending a projection of the elevator’s course. The captain’s working on a response now, but I felt it right you should know.”
“What is it?” asked Tennyson. “What’s happening?”
“Deep shit,” Janna answered as she watched the projection play out on the little wrist screen.
The tether was big. Janna usually coped with the impossible height of the elevator by sliding her mind away from the view outside. The projection rammed home the inconceivable length of the tether. At 44,000 klicks, it was over three times Tranquility’s diameter. She watched as the virtual tether tumbled slowly around the planet in a highly elliptical orbit that brought them near to their initial position in ten hours, and the ships nearby. At which time the tether had twisted so much that there would be no escape for the squadron from its lethal lash.
The Hardits had turned the orbital elevator into a weapon, and aimed it straight at the Legion ships.
“Okay, Tennyson and Shinzo. Show us your cyborg skills. Maximum safe burn for the ships is 0.005g. How far would they get after ten hours burn?”
There was a mere fraction of a second’s hesitation before they both replied. “Sixteen thousand klicks.”
The projection restarted. She held up her wrist for Tennyson and Shinzo’s benefit, but they seemed to have figured out what was going on. Even 16,000 klicks wouldn’t move the ships out of the tether’s path.
“Look at it this way, fellas,” she said. “The Navy won’t have to send a ship to rescue us from floating off into space. No need. Like it or not, we’ll be back in time for dinner.”
— Chapter 33 —
The tang of burning carried on the air, adding a spicy undercurrent to the sound of raised voices tinged with excitement mixed in with panic.
Colonel Tirunesh Nhlappo had set down in a New Detroit at war.
As she hurried through the exit tunnel from the shuttle port and out into the city, she noticed a Marine crouching at the end of the tunnel exit, SA-71 at the ready.
The sentry turned the carbine to cover Nhlappo and… she remembered the figure next to her. She’d forgotten Tizer was with her.
“Do I look like a frakking Hardit, Marine?” she bellowed.
The Marine rose to attention. “Sorry, ma’am.”
“Who’s in charge here?”
“Lieutenant Liesel.” After a moment of intense awkwardness, he added. “I’ll take you to him.”
Nhlappo’s suit AI was accepted into the local BattleNet, marking out Liesel’s position by zooming the visor display through the viewport of the shuttle port control tower, and adding an artificial blue glow to one of the Marines inside.
“No need, Marine,” she said. “Remain at your post.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he replied, and then returned to his crouching posture. Why he felt the need to crouch was one of the mysteries of pulling a force together out of soldiers trained over centuries of radically different tactical doctrines.
She made for the control tower, switching the visor view to a tactical map. Not bad. Local forces were sensibly deployed and didn’t seem to be under immediate assault. There had been many explosions, though. How had the Hardits sneaked them in?
Although communications had been hit badly, the battlesuits and the AIs within them were weathering the cyberstorm and were beginning to re-establish contact with each other. A good sign that things hadn’t entirely gone to drent here.
Her hails of the orbiting squadron were not getting a response, but a status alert told her that she’d finally re-established the comm link with her second-in-command.
“Major Spartika, respond.”
“Here, Colonel.”
“Update!”
“All around the perimeter we’re being hit by suicide bombers. They just walk up to our defenses and blow up.”
“Do they rush at us or hang back?”
Nhlappo could hear explosions and the rumble of field guns in the background as Spartika thought on that. “They seem hesitant, Colonel. Fearful.”
“Then they aren’t suicide bombers, are they? Speak with precision, Major.”
“Does their mood matter to us? Happy or not, they’re still blasting a way through our perimeter.”
“Of course it matters. The enemy used this tactic against Brandt. They will have spotters deciding when to blow their victims. And guns to shoot any who try to turn back. Let the perimeter guards deal with the bombers. Use your ranged assets to take out whoever’s driving them.” Nhlappo took a deep breath. Had things really gotten so bad? “We’ve had it easy up till now. Two years of R&R. Now it’s going to get rough. Sound the radiation alert, wait two
minutes, and then I want a spread of fusion warheads four klicks behind the suicide bombers. Nuke the bastards.”
“Roger that.” Nhlappo could imagine the grin of sheer delight on Spartika’s face as her deputy considered the destruction she was about to unleash on the enemy she loathed so much. “Launching nuclear assets in two minutes.”
The former Aux slave was a nasty piece of work, who had begun her deployment in a penal unit. But Nhlappo had to admit the vindictive little veck had done a superb job of organizing the operation to lift millions of sleeping Marines into orbit. Every time Nhlappo had promoted her, Spartika simply grew in competence until her record demanded further promotion.
Spartika had a paranoid mind. Did she suspect that Nhlappo hated her more than anyone in the galaxy? Probably.
At the moment the oscillating wail of the nuclear and radiological alert began sounding in Nhlappo’s helmet, repeated by speakers located throughout New Detroit, she was passing beneath the ceramalloy statues of the Marines under Lieutenant Brandt’s command who fell defending Detroit against overwhelming attack. In death they had secured the survival of the Sleeping Legion.
Her feet refused to obey her need to reach Lieutenant Liesel, forcing her to a halt, forcing her to remember…
You ran that day, Spartika. Left my boy to die. One day there will be a reckoning. I swear it on my son’s corpse.
“Are you okay, Colonel?”
Nhlappo frowned at the voice. Once again she’d forgotten Tizer was with her. She regarded him for a moment. His expertise was not in fighting, but that didn’t mean he had no value.
“Go underground by the most direct route,” she ordered. “Then go to the cryo storage levels. I want all the sleepers revived as soon as possible. You have my full authority to break every protocol you like. Just leave me enough power to fight my battle.”
“Yes ma’am. By raising the revival attrition rate by approximately six percent, I can increase throughput by—”
“Leading Spacer Magnetizer! I don’t want a frakking explanation. I want it done!”
Tizer blinked like a Littorane and then scurried away, leaving Nhlappo alone with the heroes from the Fall of Detroit.
The statues wore battlesuits with anonymous blank visors. But when she had first seen the statues she had immediately felt there was one she could identify. Something about the twist to the shoulders had been instantly familiar. That statue wasn’t of just another Marine. He was Serge Rhenolotte. Nhlappo had given Serge a baby name of Zug on the day she gave birth to him.
“My darling, you’ll have to wait for me,” she told this simulacrum of her son. “I won’t be joining you today.” A sudden surge of emotion choked off her words. She felt the ever-gnawing emptiness at the loss of her son who had been snatched from her as a toddler. Nhlappo had combatted half the galaxy to work her way back to him, but never found the courage to tell her adult son that she was his mother.
Hatred of the enemy flowed in her veins like lava, mixed in with terror and a desire to kill that burned so strongly in every fiber of her body that she was sure she could feel her battlesuit inject extra coolant to counteract her feverish excitement.
Like all Marines, Colonel Tirunesh Nhlappo had been born for a single purpose: war. The Earth-evolved survival instincts of a cornered animal were joining forces with her body’s implants and the work of generations of Jotun bio-engineers; together they prepared her for battle.
She raised her arms in front of her and reveled in the sheer thrill of power as she closed her fists, imagining Tawfiq’s spine within her grip being crushed into powder in one hand, while the other squeezed the breath from Major Spartika.
Frakk! She had forgotten how good this felt.
“We will meet soon enough, Zug.” She grinned. “I’ve a war to win first. And a score to settle.”
— Chapter 34 —
What would Indiya do?
Loobie nearly laughed out loud. When she had a crisis of confidence Indiya used to ask herself the same question, only with Loobie as the mentor to be followed. When had their positions reversed?
Even Indiya would think twice, though, to take such risks on the basis of a Marine officer’s gut instinct that the full extent of the enemy’s attack was yet to come.
The maximum safe acceleration with their precarious load was 0.005g. At three times that rate, they would at best lose some of the sleeping Marines, the harness unable to cope with the sudden strain. At worst, the main attachment points would prove stronger than Beowulf’s hull, and the ship would be ripped apart.
And Beowulf was only towing half a million cryo pods. The largest ship, Leviathan, was pulling twice that.
Loobie instructed her hormonal implants to give a boost of resolution and fealty. This was no time to question orders.
While a background process in her head linked with her comm station to raise the other two ships, she issued her order. “Helm, ahead 0.015g.”
This was the moment when Beowulf’s strength would be tested. And not just her superstructure. Her crew too.
Most of the CIC crew probably didn’t notice Ensign Harpur’s hesitation before he confirmed the order. “Ahead 0.015g, aye. Linear acceleration profile set to 300 seconds.”
Loobie caught the catch in the ensign’s voice, though. She’d watched him like a predatory animal since he’d transferred from the loyalist fleet they’d engaged at Khallini. Harpur also had more experience than most other members of her crew. Loobie hadn’t even thought of building up the acceleration over a few minutes. But how much time did they have?
“Negative, Harpur. Build our burn over 200.”
“Revising acceleration profile to 200 seconds.”
Loobie’s body registered the instant a sense of up and down returned. There was no engine roar, no forces crushing her down into her chair, and no sound of the hull protesting against its load – not yet, anyway. As quietly as a shameful apology, Beowulf began her escape.
The console panel built into Loobie’s command station brought up images from the bridges of the two other ships. Lieutenant Commander Schaulbe on the Leviathan looked grim but determined, Captain Phuong visible in the background, about to relieve Schaulbe. On the Jotun-crewed Indomitable, Captain Valgerd peered down her furry snout; her expression was impenetrable but Loobie still felt the Jotun was challenging her. Would the captain of a genuine warship allow a mere human to order her to place her vessel in danger?
“Wait 200 seconds for us to test the harness strength,” she instructed the other ships, “and then follow our lead, building to 0.015g acceleration. The Colonel believes the squadron faces an immediate and real threat. We have been ordered to leave the system immediately and head for Khallini.” As an afterthought she appended: “And I am complying with my orders.”
The two other ships acknowledged her order without hesitation. Loobie returned her attention to her own vessel, just in time for Beowulf to exceed Tizer’s maximum safe acceleration of 0.005g.
The main wraparound CIC screen now showed Beowulf and the immense cargo harness network that grew from the upper and lower hull. She looked like a flattened nut caught in huge wire-frame jaws colored blue-white. Individual lines that made up those jaws began to blush with color.
How much of this display was being fed from live sensor data and how much inferred guesswork? Tizer was the expert and he had been caught up in the Colonel’s need to fight a ground war. All of this was untested. They weren’t supposed to be leaving the system for another year.
The image in the screen was growing redder.
“Engineering, load status?”
“Strain shunts are re-routing impulse force around overloaded harness nodes. Harness is holding so far.”
“Acceleration at 0.01g,” announced Harpur from his helm station. “Maximum acceleration in 64 seconds.”
Twice the maximum safe acceleration and they were holding so far. Tizer was convinced that if the acceleration was tiny enough, you could pull a battleship
through the deep void using a single human hair as a towline. The universe was too messy for her to believe that, but if they reached 0.015g without catastrophe, she was confident they could maintain that burn. Turning and acceleration were risks, but not ones Beowulf need face until she was scheduled to jettison the outer layer of the harness and increase the acceleration. But that wasn’t due for over a year.
Loobie was hailed by Beowulf’s CAG, the officer responsible for her small craft, which were right now evacuating the teams outside who had been loading cryo pods onto the harness. “Captain, I can coordinate just as well from a shuttle. Permission to take out a spare bird and run operations from the outside.”
The request made sense. But the CAG was Ensign Dock, and Loobie didn’t trust the former traitor, preferring to keep him where she could see him.
On the other hand, he was the best pilot they had. “Granted.”
Dock’s feet thudded away from his position in the upper CIC deck. He flew headfirst through the gap separating the decks, bounced off a bulkhead, and fell the remaining distance in a slow-motion tumble that ended in a low-g sprint out of CIC. For the oldest human on board, Dock was impressively spritely.
“Leviathan and Indomitable have their engines hot,” said Anunwe, the Sensor Team officer. “They’re ready to burn.”
A message came in from the bridge. “Captain, secondary command crew are operational.” It was Marquez, the XO who had transferred from a surrendered Old Empire ship, and was now on standby with a secondary crew on the bridge which would take over if CIC was lost. Like Harpur, Marquez was a more experienced officer than the Beowulf’s captain.
“Thank you, Commander. Please coordinate evacuation of EVA teams while CAG is en route to his bird.”
“Coordinating flight plans, aye.”
Loobie’s attention was wrenched upward to the main screen. Red lights flared in the center of each harness. Numbers that meant nothing to her blinked alerts at the side of the display.
“What just happened?” asked the XO.