Vindication

by Ken Wolfson

  "I can't! There's safeguards on the door, and even if I could force it open the decompression would kill us both. We're stuck."

  "No, Dad, there has to be a way, there has to be! Please, gods, don't leave me here!" She pounded on the window. The anchorage shook with another nuclear blast.

  Adrian radioed Amelie, and his helmet filled with static.

  "Amelie, I'm at the 6A-79V junction, I need to get back into 6A immediately," Adrian said.

  "I'm patching another route. Hurry up—our troopers are in a firefight covering the evacuation! House Venko and fleet troopers are just gunning down everyone."

  Adrian studied the route; he'd be taking a four-kilometer loop just to reach the nearest intact junction, and he'd have to hope he found a serviceable airlock along the way.

  “I need a shorter route.”

  “There is none, I’m sorry,” Amelie said.

  “Dad!” She hammered on the window.

  "I'm sorry, there isn't," Adrian said. Something glowed in the window's reflection, and a wave of dry heat washed over him. Alyssa gaped over his shoulder.

  "Aly, there's nothing I can do," he said.

  "Dad, you've always found a way. It's just a bulkhead between us. We’ve been separated for almost a year we can’t be pulled apart now," Aly said.

  "Aly, listen to me," Adrian said.

  "No, Dad, listen to me. We're going to find another way to meet up. You are not leaving me up here," Alyssa said. That’s not how that worked.

  "Listen to me. If this station falls, the mutineers will search for loyalists and their families. Ditch your jacket and my rank pins and any other fleet gear on you. Find a shelter and hide until the shooting stops. If you can, find Germaine. If we win the fight I'll find you in hours. If we lose, I'll be back in a few weeks when the armada retakes the anchorage."

  "Dad, I'm not ditching your jacket. I'll be so cold up here," she said.

  "Better than dead. Whoever these people are, if they find you with that, they'll hurt you real bad. Get rid of it, and hide." he said. His hands shook, rattled out a tattoo on the glass.

  The light behind Adrian was now a steady orange glow. He craned his neck. Gouts of plasma burst from somewhere far down the corridor and dissipated in the void, each orange flare walking a few meters closer to him. They cooked the bloated corpses in their path to an unidentifiable crisp.

  "I will come back for you, I promise!"

  He punched the window. Alyssa screamed something, but he'd already broken contact. He stepped back and froze his last image of her in his mind. She was huddled against the window, bent over double. Her body shook; her face was a ruddy mess of tears and makeup. She was a fragile songbird thrown into the grinder.

  Then he turned, while he still could, and ran towards the fire.

  #

  Chapter Nine: The New Inferno

  Adrian stumbled onto the bridge and doubled over, hacking with rib-cracking force. He spat a puddle of black soot-bile onto the deck and straightened up.

  "Commander!" Amelie said, and approached.

  "I'm fine. Status of ship report now." He limped to his station, knowing there was no time to absorb his own injuries. Once there he shucked off his EVA suit. It was like stepping out of a hot sauna; his uniform beneath was soaked in sweat and immediately chilled onto him. He grabbed a water bottle and downed it to soothe his scorched throat, then got to work. Around him dozens of officers in varying states of dress were chattering while hundreds of monitors blared information, every bit of it bad.

  Adrian took a long breath, and concentrated. His adrenaline glands pumped into overdrive. His heart pounded, then faded as he tuned it out. The pain of his burning throat and arthritic knees drained away. The hundreds of data streams slowed until he could make out every important word and symbol. He was home, comfortable, and now some rebel scum was going to die.

  "Reactors one, two, and four are spun up to full, our barrier fields are on standby, and the Knights are in their launch tubes. The board is green," Amelie said. "We're waiting on clearance from someone in the chain of command to act."

  "Who's in charge, and who's doing the shooting?" Adrian said. TACNET was a maelstrom of exclusively blue signatures splattering against each other; no red in sight. Not even Wendago Dragoon transponders.

  "No fucking clue, sir," Cage said, and earned a glare from Amelie for swearing on duty. "None of the command channels—whoever is attacking shut them down the moment the shooting started. This is a giant friendly fire shitstorm. Like a bar brawl."

  "Clearly they're not all blue. Tell the fighter pilots to be ready. "Adrian pulled on his headphones and keyed through the channels himself. Dozens of voices screamed back at him, panicked or dying as their ships went up. "Comms, raise Molyneux, ID number CVS-77712," he said.

  "Negative contact. Sorry, sir," Sare said. Adrian considered the possibility Molitor was dead with his super carrier, and dismissed it. They were too tough to die from a stab in the back. They'd probably slipped tether soon as the shooting started, and pulled range from the melee. Which was what Vindication needed to do. Supercarriers weren't frontline warships; they were tough, but dreadnoughts were far tougher, and there were a lot of dreads out there.

  "Helm, make ready to get underway. We're safer in open space where we can maneuver," he said.

  "Harbor control has refused our request to open the hatches," Sare said sheepishly.

  "Put them on speaker," Adrian said. He braced for some bureaucratic bullshit.

  "Done," Sare said.

  "Harbor Control, Vindication. Let us loose, that's an order," Adrian said.

  "Vindication, we're a dry dock, not a carrier. I don't care who's giving the orders, I'm not opening the hatch so you get a few—"

  She screamed and fell into static. A thud-thud reverberated through the bridge, like beating down a wall with a sledgehammer.

  "The dry dock is taking fire. There's a BC three-zero-zero kilometers directly dorsal-wards, firing steadily," Amelie said. She wrestled with her console while hits rained down atop them. "Ship ID is Nereus, BC-11755."

  "Someone knows who we are," Cage said in blatant satisfaction.

  "I can't put our barriers up until we're clear of the docking clamps. They'll interfere with the magnetic fields and cause a resonance collapse," Amelie said. The battlecruiser let loose another salvo. The dry dock's ceiling sprayed over their hull like a shotgun blast. Warning lights flared at the Damage Control station.

  "Hail Nereus and warn her we're friendly," Adrian said.

  "She's shooting us," Cage protested.

  "And we do a double check to make sure. We don't fire on friendly transponders without double and triple checking, and then saying some prayers first," Amelie snapped. True; shooting one's family in arms, no matter the justification, was grounds for ostracization by the entire military and a full court martial.

  "Nereus answered our hails with a virus package, which I'm now purging," Sare said. "Damn rude of them."

  That decided Adrian. "Get us out of here."

  Grissom hit the maneuvering jets. Vindication strained at the docking clamps with a groan and recoiled. The chief navigator shook his head and tried again, to similar results.

  They were trapped, defenseless. No, Adrian corrected himself; there was always a strategy to win. He just had to take it.

  "Full power to the point defense grid. Target the docking clamps."

  "There's civilians in the AO," Cage warned. Another salvo struck whipple armor with a ding. Adrian's mind wandered. Alyssa should have been cowering in the comfort of his quarters, safe beneath that armor and the efforts of the best crew in Wicked Creek. Adrian shook his head out of the clouds. Worry later, damn fool.

  "We've got far more people aboard this ship who'll be dead in minutes. Open fire, and may the court martial find reason in our actions!" He glared at Cage until the lower rank wavered.

  "Yes, sir," Cage said. He calculated the firing solutions for the point defense grid
and dispatched those down the chain of command. Vindication's point defense turrets rose on their haunches. 200 turrets, dual-barrel 40-millimeter cannon. They let off a quick burst, shattering the docking clamps, airlock bridges, and blowing at least a dozen unfortunate souls into the void.

  "Good work, Major," Adrian said. "Helm, full thrust on bow maneuvering jets, point our nose straight at Nereus."

  "Yes, sir," Grissom said. The deck hummed with power from the plasma drives. He aimed Vindication's flat nose for space. Her maneuvering jets provided just enough thrust to kick her clear of the dry dock wreckage and get her accelerating at .05 g towards her opponent.

  "Magnetic barrier fields at 100," Amelie said. Adrian gave her a thumbs-up.

  "Comms, hail Nereus again. Use my personal ID. Tell her we've got no idea what's going on and to stand down," Adrian he said. He'd never fired on a friendly transponder before, never slain another one of Jacob Hallard's chosen soldiers. But victory came first, and he'd do it gladly now.

  Nereus kept on firing, her railgun batteries red-hot.

  "Fire control, I want a fire mission on Nereus, full nuclear warheads. Launch on my mark," he said. Secretly, he felt the cool rush of relief. This was a problem that would be solved with anger.

  "Torpedo tubes are vented. Launch on your mark," Cage said.

  There was no way Nereus missed the 2000-meter supercarrier bearing down on her. Her TACNET had to be screaming proximity alarms. Through raw stupidity or bawls, her COS kept her on station firing down Vindication's throat. Adrian let the range counter drop below 200 clicks.

  "Execute.”

  Cage hit the red button. In Vindication's dorsal fire control, another gunnery officer hit a button. Every missile was simultaneously slung clear on magnetic coils. Sixty sets of batter-powered plasma thrusters ignited, pumping each warhead past 100g acceleration. Their flight lasted a hair over a second. Each 20-megaton warhead barely had time to arm itself before impacting.

  The Geiger counter screamed as an ugly blotch of static spread across TACNET’s center. Vindication struck through its center and emerged unscathed.

  The interference faded. Two chunks of irradiated battlecruiser drifted apart, their paths curving as they fell into the Anchorage's gravity well.

  "Nereus killed," Amelie said. She wiped sweat from her brow, and grimaced at what they'd done.

  "Can we identify hostiles?" Adrian said. With no ships firing on his, he took a breath and surveyed the battlespace.

  There were hundreds of ships in the area, all trying to kill each other. He saw carriers being swarmed by their own escorts and dreadnoughts firing from neighboring berths. And the civilian ships wandered through it all, and died horribly. The maelstrom had swallowed Wicked Creek’s capitol.

  "I... maybe we do, sir," Sare said. A hundred kilometers away, the escort carrier Walton snapped in half under fire from the dreadnoughts Zeus and Russell. Her bow half drifted downward, trailing escape pods, and slammed into a reactor heat vent. A wing of the anchorage flared and went dark.

  "Don't give me a maybe, give me a definite," Adrian said. He demanded certainty in combat. Both DNEs' signatures turned white as they target-locked Vindication.

  "Okay, I've been monitoring comms, and some of the encryption codes used match the codes used by Emoche Hulle's Wendago during their assault on Vykhor. With a few minutes I can identify all ships using those codes," Sare said.

  "Do it. In the meantime, helm, pull range from the fight at 10g acceleration, take up orbit at ten-thousand clicks, and avoid other warships best you can," Adrian said.

  The BC Hydra, back alight in explosions, rammed Zeus. The DNE’s bow crumped and she ricocheted away into space. A second, the Okafor threw herself between Russell and Vindication and opened up. Adrian made a silent salute as Okafor began losing that duel.

  Grissom took the opportunity to point Vindication's flat nose to open space and yank down the thrusters. In the aft section, ceramic-coated valves opened, diverting plasma from the reactors aft to the thrusters. Once in the mammoth drives the plasma was magnetically accelerated. A tongue of flames five-hundred kilometers long burst from Vindication's rear, cooking an assortment of debris and corpses behind her. A civilian atmosphere-hopper melted, her atmosphere igniting within before the chemical bonds holding her hull together failed. Adrian was too busy to grieve.

  "I'm through, sir. I've got a semi-reliable IFF," Sare said.

  "Very good work, Captain. Feed that data into TACNET and the targeting computer. Let's see who our friends are," Adrian said.

  Two-thirds of the warships on TACNET turned from friendly red to hostile blue. Now, the battle had an order to it. The hostiles were setting up a perimeter of battlecruisers and capitol ships orbiting around Anchorage. They fired indiscriminately into the melee.

  Fresh alarms wailed on the bridge, sticking pins in Adrian's ear drums. Dozens of the nearest hostiles flashed white.

  "Not groovy, not groovy, they know who we are," Cage said.

  Adrian's heartbeat barely rose. "We've done worse. Drop chaff and continue pulling range. Comms, contact the nearest friendlies and tell them under the authority of Commander Adrian Huxton to link up with us." They made orbit, taking light fire, and alone.

  Adrian’s worry was being outflanked. All warships had one barrier generator guarding each vector, and these strained the power grid when needed. If two dreadnoughts fired on Vindication from one vector she could tank the punishment for an hour. If they came at her from opposing vectors then her barriers would quickly overload her power grid, dropping fast and exposing her cracked armor. Fleet combat centered around flanking in three dimensions.

  "Sir, fresh transmission coming through in the clear, its clean, and—and it matches Emoche Hulle's ID from Vykhor," Sare said.

  Adrian remembered Venko the Lessor's reaction, and then Tarly's taunting. He should have pursued Emoche and killed him at Vykhor. There was a conspiracy, and he'd doomed millions with his lapse in responsibility.

  "Put it on intercom," he said.

  "Greetings, people of the United Systems."

  Adrian recognized the voice from the speeches he'd made as the Wendago closed on Vykhor. He spoke with power, a confident and unwavering tone that betrayed zero doubt in his righteous actions. Like the voice of The Founder in his speeches.

  "My name is Emoche Hulle, and I am your savior. Forty years ago, the hero Jacob Hallard rose up and created a free nation for all of humanity to prosper. The one true god, Evander, lord of sol, thought The Founder's work to be done, and recalled him to live in the paradise of the legendary Earth, and left the United Systems to your hands. But you did not go forth and prosper; you did not take all of humanity under your great wings so that they too could enjoy the golden age. Instead, you let your greed and lust tear down your god-gifted nation one piece at a time. Look at the systems now; you've made her a ruin with maggots rotting its heart. Fear not, humanity. I am the second disciple of Evander. I will bring you to the golden age by force."

  "Oh, fuck me. This guy again," Amelie said, and buried her face in her hands. After seconds, she remembered she was a Colonel in Systems Armada, and with a grunt regained posture. "Commander, orders?"

  An alarm trilled over the bridge din. "We're being target-locked and pursued," Cage said.

  "Who?" Adrian said. Several signatures detached from the melee.

  "I count four ships. BCs Jabbar and Lillard, CVE Endeavor, and the CVS Righteous. They're across the battlespace. Range is 120-kay kilometers, CBDR," Cage said. "Righteous is pissed we stole the golden E from her last year," he added.

  "Any friendlies answer our call?" Adrian said.

  "A couple did, but they got killed escaping the melee," Amelie said.

  Adrian had one option left.

  "The United Systems has lost this battle," he said.

  His words dropped like an anvil onto the bridge.

  "Our priority is to disengage, survive, and regroup for a counterattack. We will be b
ack, and we will perform capital punishment on every one of our family who broke their oath to the fleet. Helm, plot a retreat from the battlespace, flank acceleration. Flight control, I want all wings in space and formed up to run cover on our escape vector," he said. The bridge officers redoubled their efforts.

  "Destination?" Grissom said.

  "The jump shelf. Tarly's going to chase us all the way there," Adrian said.

  "Yes, sir. Calculating course," Grissom said. Vindication was equipped with the fleet's standard 12:1 inertial compensator. Currently she was running at 12g acceleration, creating 1g of inertia on the bridge. Artificial gravity outside the central corridor was offline, conserving power as their acceleration provided all the gravity needed. The safe cruise limit was 36g, above which point humans suffered long-term detriment.

  An emotionless female voice declared over the intercom. "All hands brace for high-gravitational maneuvers."

  Adrian strapped himself into his seat. Every chair on the ship doubled as a crash couch for such maneuvers.

  "Course put in, now for the death race," Grissom said, and pushed the throttle down all the way.

  Vindication hit 36g in minutes and climbed. Adrian was crushed into his padded seat, as were the other officers. Damaged panels dropped from the ceiling like mortars. Grissom hit 60g and leveled off. His calculated course was a dotted line on TACNET. It left the anchorage's gravity well, slingshot around Tollyon's distant barren moon and shot off into space until it reached the jump shelf, where the cumulative gravity well of Tollyon's combined celestial bodies decreased enough to permit FTL egress.

  Righteous and her escorts matched acceleration easily. The battlespace was left far behind. Incoming fire slackened as Grissom and his nav crew gained more projectile flight time to dodge incoming fire.

  Finally, luck broke their way. With the clusterfuck of the Anchorage between the supercarriers, Righteous was forced to take a circuitous route around the fight. She hopped back on Vindication's tale 100,000 klicks aft.

  "Aly's strapped down in a chair, right?" Amelie said.