by Kal Spriggs
It was going to be close, he knew. A well-trained pilot could get his shuttle clear of the larger ship and it’s drive field fast. But those kind of combat maneuvers brought risks of their own, not to mention throwing the shuttle’s passengers around. A thirty second combat undocking was possible.
Rawn had drilled his team back at Harmony. It took them just under forty seconds from the command to clearing the inner layer of the drive field. From there, it was another fifteen seconds to get inside the radiation shielding near the hull. Their suits were rated for radiation heavy environment of deep space, but the close proximity of the warp drive would be… bad. The exotic particles generated by the warp field without the heavy shielding of the radiation screen could cook his people alive.
In the process, they hurtled towards the hull of the ship, not daring to trigger their maneuvering thrusters until they were almost in contact with the hull. In training for this, he’d had ten of his people injured and two of them killed.
But they were all volunteers.
Rawn counted off the seconds as he dropped towards the hull of the other ship. Forty, forty-one, forty-two…
***
“Shuttle is clear,” Fenris reported, “bringing up the drive.”
Mel nodded, biting her lip as she watched the shuttle drop towards the planet. She couldn’t help but feel she was missing something, her stomach was twisting into knots. But her people were on their way now. Mel almost called them back, almost ordered Fenris to keep the drive field down and bring the shuttle back aboard, but she quashed that thought. She had to be prepared for the threat of the enemy ships.
***
Marcus knew that Fenris would be watching him. He knew Mel didn’t trust him, not anymore. He wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t like he’d done anything to earn that distrust. Well, nothing she should know about anyway…
Coming here to Vagyr had been a mistake on her part. She was too worried about what people would think, too concerned with the possible outcomes of solutions to accept an alternative. Mel had put herself at risk, put all of them at risk.
Now it was time for Marcus to save them.
As the shuttle peeled away from the ship, Marcus triggered the software he’d programmed into his radio. The transmitter waited until it detected the radiation burst of the warp field engaging, then it sent out a pulsed transmission, encrypted on a special Guard Intelligence cypher and sent out in the handful of seconds while Fenris’s sensors would be temporarily blinded while the warp field drive stabilized.
Marcus’s last contact with Agent Scadden had put him here at Vagyr. He was pulling the strings on things happening in the Harmony Protectorate, but he’d wanted to be near a large enough Guard Fleet element that he could intervene if it became necessary. At least, Marcus assumed that was why his former protégé was operating out of the system.
That done, Marcus set back in his seat, his eyes closed as he considered what was about to happen. Mel seemed to think she could get the Guard to fight Admiral Mizra’s people and that they’d magically forget about Mel and Admiral Rao.
Marcus knew better. But maybe Agent Scadden could step in. Almost certainly Admiral Rao would disappear into a holding cell, never to be seen again. But men like him, people who stood up against the system, they never lived long anyway. Maybe in a century or two he’d be remembered as a martyr and his family would get some kind of official apology, but the man was doomed the second he’d stepped out of line. It didn’t matter what system he fought against: the corrupt oligarchs of the Harmony Protectorate or those that ran Guard Fleet. Oligarchs didn’t tolerate their subjects stepping out of line.
Trying to save him was foolish and it just put them all at risk.
And if Mel didn’t understand that now, well then, Marcus would have to give her a lesson.
***
…Forty-five—
“Oh god,” someone screamed over the net, “the warp fiel—”
The call cut off with utter suddenness. Rawn didn’t need to ask what that meant. The warp drive was back online and his suit’s passive sensors screamed at him as radiation peaked.
In a split second he knew he didn’t have ten more seconds. Even before he completed the thought, he triggered his suit’s thrusters, cranking up the speed when his suit’s course instead showed him decelerating. He rotated his suit, so that he was feet down towards the on-rushing ship.
“Full thrust!” he shouted over his comm, not knowing if any of his people would hear it with the background radiation… or if they were all already dead. He set his suit to trigger a braking maneuver just before impact. If the ship had any additional relative motion or he’d misjudged the timing, the collision would kill him. “Set mag grapples!”
He knew that his suit’s magnetic grapples were designed to catch up to a certain velocity, but he was going to be hitting well outside that speed. His boots had to hit and stick or else he’d bounce away from the hull, probably hard enough that he’d be unconscious when his suit tumbled away, no doubt dumping him outside the radiation shielding.
He didn’t have any more time to think about it, though, the hull was rushing up far too fast. His suit thrusters kicked on and his world faded to black.
***
Brian Liu eyed his “team” as the combat shuttle dropped towards the surface of Vagyr.
Marcus Keller, or Nigel Troy as he went by now, or even Jean Paul Leone, as he’d been born, was a familiar, albeit unpredictable factor. Brian wasn’t certain if the man was on Rex or not. As a drug addict, Marcus could be amazingly confident and capable… but also possessed of his own superiority and arrogance to a point that even Brian found him grating. Without Rex, he was often a moody, brooding wreck. Either way, he often made leaps in logic that were hard to follow from the outside. The only thing certain about Marcus was that Brian couldn’t trust him to stick to plan.
Swaim was a remarkably predictable opposite. He was young, eager, and foolish. As a lookout, Brain didn’t expect much of him. Brian planned to put him somewhere safe and out of the way where he couldn’t bungle anything in his enthusiasm to help. Brian had searched the young man for weapons and given him a lecture that as a lookout, he was best off unarmed so that he appeared to be a civilian. Still, the young man had talked Brian into allowing him to bring along a box of electronics surveillance equipment which he planned to install all around the meeting site. He’d had some good points about the potential usefulness of the gear, but Brian couldn’t help but wonder if Swaim had slipped something by him, somehow.
Samantha Yewell, Jeremiah Swaim’s mother, was another pendulum swing in the opposite direction. She was far too knowledgeable about weapons and military tactics for Brian to accept her at face value, no matter how pretty that face might be. Her confidence, too, was a match for Brian’s own. Brian could admit, if only to himself, that he could be a bit arrogant at times, so he should have felt as irritated by her. Instead, he felt an odd attraction. It was different from what he felt for Mel.
Everyone felt something for Mel, of course, but Brian recognized her spark of charisma. She was also painfully young, to him, too eager to do the right thing, to stand up for what was good and just. Brian thought of her almost like a kid sister. He hadn’t ever had any family, of course, but…
He restrained a sigh. His mind was rambling. He’d been thinking of Yewell and then it had drifted away. His mind seemed to do that a lot with the woman. She was surprisingly capable, strong, and confident. His blood stirred a bit as he looked at her, decked out in body armor and weapons, leaning back in her jump-seat with a confident smirk.
And then there’s me, he thought to himself. He was over six hundred years old. Bored with everything. Bored to the point that he’d basically shut down, before Mel had found him. He’d helped out those mutants and genetically modified people he’d come across, helping them to avoid the Guard, but it had all been so easy, so boring. He’d worked as a mercenary, a bounty hunter, an assassin. He’d killed people on hu
ndreds of worlds, in space, on the ground, in cities and out on the frontiers thousands of kilometers from civilization. Nothing made him feel so alive as when he fought… and even that had lost its edge for him: fighting for money, fighting for profit, when the money didn’t matter.
He’d been alone for so long nothing had mattered anymore. Friendships and rivalries had come and gone, the fleeting lives of normal humans became insignificant, even less so for how fragile and frail they all were. They became faceless, even the mutants and genetically modified people he’d helped. He’d stopped caring about them as individuals.
Then there’d been Mel. She was so alive. So stubborn. So infuriatingly confident that she had a duty to do the right thing. To fight to save the fleeting lives of her fellow normal people.
Brian could have left Mel behind, could have walked away and disappeared. He had accounts on Hanet or any number of other worlds, with more money than he’d ever need. But her spark of charisma had awoken something in him. To fight for a cause, to fight for something that was right… it felt like he’d woken up again.
So now, once more, he was going into a fight. Outnumbered, certainly. Outgunned, without a doubt. But he was fighting for something… and that made him feel more alive than he had in decades.
***
Chapter 16
Time: 0600 24 February 292 G.D.
Location: Vagyr System, Harlequin Military Sector, Guard Space
Agent Scadden of Guard Intelligence reviewed the data that Jean Paul had transmitted to him, even as he monitored the sensor feed at his station on Commodore Webb’s bridge.
The Guard Fleet officer wore a sour expression. He didn’t like Scadden’s presence. That was admirable of him, really. The fact that he wasn’t a toady to whatever Guard Intelligence officer who came along was a mark in his favor. Of course, it also meant he wouldn’t do exactly as he was told and that he’d ask questions, which made using him in this particular scenario… problematic.
Jean Paul had transmitted a full report of the events at Harmony as well as what had happened at the Gallan and Tremaine systems. Since Scadden had been hoping that Admiral Mizra really had accepted the Drakkus Empire’s offer of asylum, that bit had come as something of a surprise.
But the presence of Captain Ortega of Guard Fleet made for an interesting complication as well. Guard Intelligence had actually flagged Captain Ortega and several of his “Task Group Javelin.” There’d been too many questions about his mission parameters, too many questions about his benefactors signing off on his “special orders” and all then dying of mysterious causes. Scadden didn’t know if Captain Ortega was behind it or someone else, but there were questions he wanted to ask.
Not that he was going to risk going over there himself, of course. Nor was he about to trigger any kind of fight between Task Group Javelin and Admiral Mizra’s Task Force, not in orbit over an inhabited world.
Jean Paul’s final bit of the report was the most interesting, however: I recommend that you intervene at the meeting site. I’d recommend a bomb, something to take out the primaries and give you official reason to intervene. Of course, I’ll be on site, so if you can intervene, I’ll emplace the charge I’ve prepared and you can move in before the dust settles. Just let me know if you can intervene.
Scadden wasn’t sure why, but Jean Paul always did love using explosives to solve his problems. It was something of his mindset, Scadden supposed, an interesting window into the mind of a man whose very unpredictability made him oddly predictable.
But in this case, a bomb might very well work. If Captain Ortega was in the employ of someone who wanted Admiral Rao dead or captured, then he would almost certainly want to be on-site or near it. The same for whatever of the renegade Harmony Protectorate elements that landed. Jean Paul’s bomb might kill them, but it was more likely that it would kill Admiral Rao. That was the way that Jean Paul tended to think: take out what they’re fighting over and sow enough confusion so no one knew who to blame.
That confusion would enable him to land troops and secure the site… and any survivors on the ground.
“Commodore Webb,” Agent Scadden looked up from his display, “I’d like you to ready a team. I’ve received information about a possible illegal weapons transfer about to go down here on Vagyr.”
The Guard Fleet officer glowered at him. “Weapons transfer?”
“Yes, a renegade Guard Fleet officer, the commanding officer of Task Group Javelin that just arrived, may be trying to sell weapons to a known terrorist group,” Scadden paused. Admiral Mizra’s renegade Harmony Protectorate Defense Force wasn’t listed as terrorists, not yet. At least, not by Guard Fleet. A little white lie never hurt anyone, he decided. “The intelligence points to Guard Free Now being the buyers.”
“Those nutcases?” Commodore Webb asked. “Great. If that’s the case, I’m not sending a ‘team,’ I’m sending battalion. Where’s the meetup location?”
“Forwarding the coordinates to you now, Admiral,” Scadden smiled. If the Admiral’s people were a little trigger happy and jumpy at the thought of engaging Guard Free Now terrorists, so much the better. Jean Paul no doubt had a plan to escape, and even if he didn’t… well, he was a survivor. Still, not all of Melanie Armstrong’s crew knew what was about to happen.
“We have a team in place, the Mercenary Guild vessel that arrived earlier. They’re pretending to facilitate the operation, but they’re acting as our informants,” Scadden told the Guard Fleet officer, aware of the various listening ears on the flag bridge. “They’re going to detonate some of the equipment as a signal of when we’re clear to come in and make the bust.”
“Great,” Commodore Webb grunted. “I’ll be sure my people are on the lookout for explosions.”
“Thank you, sir,” Scadden smiled. “Of course, I’m sure you’ll be considering a plan to engage the two groups of ships in space so as to avoid civilian casualties?”
Commodore Webb leveled a baleful glare in Scadden’s direction. The problem of the possibly hostile ships was now firmly in his court. “The second group of ships, there, they identified themselves as being of the Harmony Protectorate.”
“False flagged,” Scadden told him without pause. “Intelligence suggests that Guard Free Now has suborned various renegade and pirate vessels and plans to arm and equip them from this weapons deal.” It was amazing how well that sounded. It might even end up in his official report.
***
The meeting place they’d chosen was a sprawling abandoned factory on the south side of Vagyr’s capital planet. The city didn’t have any prohibitions on landing outside of the spaceport itself, not for shuttles and other small craft. So they’d set down the shuttle a couple of kilometers away in a secluded spot and walked in.
“Three shuttles landing fifteen hundred meters to your south, that’s Captain Ortega’s team,” Fenris reported. Brian had already heard the roar of thrusters and identified the noise and rough location. “Two more shuttles are inbound, they’re headed to a landing site roughly twelve hundred meters to your north.”
“Bracketing us,” Marcus grunted. He seemed remarkably calm about that, which told Brian to expect him to do something stupid. He’s got to be on Rex again… the bastard.
“Swaim, what’s your status?” Brian asked.
“I’m set up in the stairwell to the west. My gear is all setup and, uh, I’m good to go,” he sounded nervous. Brian wondered if he was nervous because of the incoming armed men or because he was trying to hide something. Probably both.
Samantha Yewell stood calmly a few meters away. The media star normally looked attractive and confident. But now, with the threat of armed confrontation, she stood differently. There was a feline element to her pose, as if she were a predatory cat, ready to pounce. Her expression was at once serene and watchful in a way that caused Brian’s blood to rush to certain places. I do love an armed woman…
Focus. He blinked and took a deep breath. He pulled out his radio, “Gen
tlemen,” he called out over his radio, sending his transmission in the open. “We’re waiting and trusting you to come here in good faith. We’re ready and waiting for you, please don’t make me wait too long, I might get peckish.”
Yewell gave a slight chuckle, “Taunting them, much?” She looked over her shoulder, smirking at him.
“Good to let them know who is in charge,” Brian answered with a matching smirk. He was starting to like her.
“Uh, guys,” Swaim said urgently, “we’ve got a problem. There’s another shuttle coming in fast and low, and it’s not from either of our groups.”
“Fenris?” Brian demanded.
“A shuttle just vanished off Traffic Control’s scanners. It came from a vessel that just arrived in orbit,” he growled. “No ID on the shuttle, but the transport has been flagged by Guard Fleet as a suspicious vessel. No outstanding warrants, but it may be a smuggler.”
“That shuttle’s coming in low and fast,” Swaim spoke excitedly. “Should we engage it?”
“With what, smart ass?” Brian demanded. Sure, he’d brought some heavier firepower, but that was here in the building. Swaim might be picking it up with his sensors, but he wasn’t armed.
“Uh…” Swaim hesitated. “I kind of brought the plasma rifle.”
“What?” Brian demanded. “How in the hell did you do that?”
“It was hidden in the surveillance gear,” Swaim answered. “I mean, you guys didn’t even search there. I got it hooked up to the roof on a turret system I rigged up, want me to take the shot?”
Brian covered his face with his gloved hands. Maybe he was wrong, maybe he was too old for this shit.