“I don’t think we choose to recognize your authority in this matter,” Jeph said. “Admiral, Madam Roja, you both can keep from escalating things any further if you will simply—”
“Escalate things? You’re damned arrogant for an ice hauler commander,” Jeffers said.
“No, I am not at all. I just know where I stand,” he said, twisting to face the captain. He tried to hold on to a mask of calm he didn’t feel, but the drugs helped. “Please, sit down and we can talk this through. If you don’t, it will get a lot worse.”
Nobody moved.
“Let me show you something before this gets out of control,” Jeph said. “I want to access your wallscreen and then we can talk. You need to see what I have to show you, and then you can decide how you want to play your hand.”
Jeffers glanced at the admiral who nodded.
Jeph tapped his thinpad and two images opened on the wallscreen. “Do you recognize what these are?” he asked.
“The Jakob Waltz and probably the Hector,” Jeffers said.
“Yes. They’re also the only possible access to what we’ve found down there,” he said. “If you want to know what that is, you have to enter through one or the other of them.”
“What’s to stop us from taking them by force if you refuse to cooperate?” she said.
“If you can get down to the surface, we’d lose any firefight,” he said. “But that’s not as easily accomplished as you think.” He got up and zoomed the image enough to see the details of the nose of the Waltz as he walked over to touch the screen. “Those might make landing a challenge for you.”
“Ice cutting lasers?” Jeffers scoffed. “You seriously think you can do any real damage with those? By the time you could hit anything we send down we’d have cut you to ribbons. We can target you with the guns on the Armstrong. From here.”
Jeph turned to face the captain and shook his head. “You can try, but we’ve got plenty of range too. If you look closely, you can see the cooling lines. We had to add those to handle the extra power.” He pointed at the dark ridges visible on the screen. “Those are a lot more than cutting lasers and they’re sitting on a megawatt primary trunk. You’ve been in range of our guns since before you released your workpod to test the gradient ceiling.”
“You’re bluffing,” Jeffers said. “You haven’t got the power supply.”
He tapped the screen on his thinpad and called up the specs on the Waltz. “You should do your homework Captain. We’ve got six HCF reactors with an output of ten gigawatt each.”
“Respectfully Captain Jeffers, he doesn’t bluff,” Seva said. She was still standing and staring down the guards.
“That only means your crew can keep us out. For now,” Nakamiru said. “But we can keep you here until they capitulate.”
“Not really,” Jeph said, returning to the table and sitting down. “We’ll leave when we’re ready and I don’t think you’re going to stop us when the time comes.”
Both guards tensed in anticipation of trouble and he caught Seva’s hand, nodding toward the seat beside him. “Nu cata etar un oolawath,” he said almost under his breath.
Nodding she sat, never breaking eye contact with them. She put her hands in her lap and fidgeted.
“Please consider what you’re about to do very carefully,” Jeph said. “I’m asking one last time for you to accompany us back down to the Jakob Waltz so you can see—”
“I’m done with you,” Roja snarled. “Bind them both.”
Jeph shook his head. “That really wasn’t the answer I was hoping to hear,” he said.
Both guards stepped forward and before they took a second step Seva was back on her feet with her plasma torch sidearm in her hand. She almost pressed it through the middle of the closest guard’s body and he stumbled backward.
Jeph tapped the screen on his thinpad and an image of the interior of their shuttlepod opened. “I’d like to call your attention to the screen one last time. Do you know what that is?”
Roja turned white. She recognized the nuclear core casing of one of their TICS.
“Before you ask, it would have about a twenty-five kiloton yield,” he said.
“Where is it?” Roja asked.
“Parked in your hangar deck aboard my shuttlepod,” Jeph said, “which is where it will remain until you accept my invitation.”
He turned and leveled his gaze on Jeffers. “I’m sorry captain, but before you think about jettisoning it, you need to understand now that it’s armed, any attempt to move it will ruin your ship.”
“There is one final thing I have to add, so you fully comprehend the situation,” he said, pulling the collar of his jumpsuit to the side to reveal a small attachment that blinked in synch with his heart rate. “Do you know what a deadman switch is?”
Nakamiru sat down and glared. “So … governor … perhaps you think you have resolved the impasse. But we have yet to finish this.”
“It never was my intent to play it out this way,” Jeph said. “I just needed to make sure you were listening.”
“What’s down there that’s worth throwing your entire career away?” Roja asked. “You do realize that’s what you have done?”
“Perhaps, but it’s probable that my career would have been over anyway,” he said, looking down at his thinpad. “FleetCom has not been generous with opportunities given to commanders who have lost their ship. Or who were born ecto.”
“Is that what this is about?” Jeffers asked.
He shook his head. “No it isn’t, but after you have seen what’s down there, you’ll understand. If not, then I will willingly submit to your tribunal and whatever disciplinary action you may deem appropriate.”
Command Deck: FleetCom Lunar L-2 Shipyard: Lunar Lagrange Two:
“Commander Visser reports Chancellor Drake is not in her quarters,” Ducat reported as he stood beside the admiral watching the tactical display on the main screen. “The team is trying to locate her now, but she isn’t responding.”
“Shit!” Quintana said. “What about Wentworth?”
“She says he’s missing too,” he said.
“We don’t have time to track them down,” the admiral said.
“Approach to Ops. The Goliath is making a heading change. It’s breaking above the pylon,” she said. “The wakeriders are ass forward and peeling velocity hard along the original heading. Looks like it’s one Hawking and one Sagan class science vessel.”
“Do we have a trajectory resolution for them?” he asked.
“If they continue braking at three-g they’ll be at zero relative, in seven minutes somewhere near the upper pylon,” she said.
“Closest blind spot to the VIP deck,” Quintana said. “Can we cover dock three with the interceptors?
“Coming in hot and braking puts their engine blast out front like a shield,” Roudini said. “They can engage from the side or front, but it’s likely they’ll face the bigger guns on the ships if they do. If they get along their flight path, they’re toast. Literally.”
“What’s currently in dock three?” the admiral asked.
“The Saber and the Katana,” he said.
Quintana shook his head. “A pair of B keels. There won’t be much room in there for a Hawking class ship.”
“I see what you’re thinking,” Ducat said. “If they can get inside the assembly cage itself, they’ll be below our firing arcs and we can’t engage them.”
“And they’re only five decks below the VIP quarters, if they can breach the airlock.”
“That’s the same conclusion we reached,” Tana said, appearing behind him.
He spun to face the unexpected voice, letting loose with a decidedly un-admiral-like reaction. “Why aren’t you in your room? I sent extra security and they’re out looking for you.”
“We’re the target,” she said. “A few extra bodies in the way won’t make much difference. They won’t quit trying until we’re out of here.”
“I don’t have any way
to get you out of here so we’ll have to fight it out.
“Actually you do,” Saf said, “but if you let them sweep the dock with their engine on the way in, you won’t.”
“Those are both experimental ships and neither of them has been trialed yet,” he said, shaking his head.
“We know the Katana was being loaded when we arrived. If it’s provisioned, let us take it,” Tana said.
Quintana glanced at Roudini who shrugged. “It’s been ready for three days, but we haven’t had a spare crew to run it,” he said.
“You know it was designed for an elite meso crew,” Saf said. “I’m more than qualified and if we can get it out of the bay before they plow it, we can save both the ship and our asses. It was designed to outrun any ship in the fleet, so they’ll never put a smack on us.”
“How the frag do you know that?” Roudini asked.
“Above your air supply,” she said, giving him a dose of elite-level hairy eyeball.
“But it’s an untested ship.” Quintana shook his head.
“It’s about to be a pile of untested scrap metal,” she said.
“Trial by fire,” Tana suggested. “Consider it a loan and we’ll send it back once we’re far enough below ground to quit drawing the lighting. But we’re draining time here admiral.”
“Where the frag do you think you can hide that they’ll quit chasing you?” he asked.
“Mars,” she said.
“If the ship’s hot, we’ve got two minutes to get aboard and four minutes to preflight. That gives you about forty-five seconds to decide admiral,” Saf said.
“The Katana is hot,” Ducat said.
“What about you Edison?” Quintana said. “Mars is a one-way trip into exile for you.”
Wentworth nodded. “Exile is better than dead, and that might be the only other option I have.”
The admiral stared at the deck plating for several seconds and shook his head. He looked over at his Ops officer. “Gabriel, give them the command codes,” he said, his face showing that he wasn’t happy. “Good luck, but please don’t make me regret this.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Armstrong Shuttlepod-018: Descending to L-4 Prime:
Katryna Roja rode quietly in the back seat of the shuttlepod beside Jeph. They were well away from the Armstrong and descending through the thickening atmosphere toward the Jakob Waltz. Behind them by 500 meters, Captain Jeffers piloted a second pod with Cori and Dr. Jameson. Jeph had agreed to let them come down, and in fact would have offered to let her bring another scientist and even Admiral Nakamiru if she’d wanted, but she was determined not to put too many of her command staff in the hands of what she had to see as a desperate renegade.
“Tell me something, governor,” she asked, adding enough acid to his title to make him wince. “Why is it so important to you to get me down there?”
“You mentioned Project Odysseus,” he said, leaning back against the wall of the pod and trying to relax despite the fact that he had just kidnapped one of the most important people in the Union. “I don’t know what you actually know about it, but my understanding is only those that had an absolute need to know, were aware of it at all.”
“I know enough to say, if what you have down there is really an ESI contact, you’re way out of your depth,” she said.
“Our doctor was a part of the Odysseus operation,” he said. “She is the one that set the wheels in motion when she sent the message down-system. We don’t know exactly what that entails because lately it’s almost impossible to sort the signal from the noise down-system. We do know that until there’s some formal response, we’re stuck on the front line whether we want to be or not. That may not make us qualified, although I’d be willing to bet nobody else is either.”
“So you’re saying it is something non-human?”
“Without a doubt,” he said, staring straight into her eyes and watching as she struggled to accept the truth of his words. For all that she might know about Odysseus, she hadn’t internalized the possibility that this could be happening.
“I can tell you’re having the same reaction I did when we realized what we might be looking at, but we’ve been studying it since we arrived,” he said.
She nodded and swallowed hard before she found her voice. “There are aliens down there?”
“Oh no,” he said, realizing that he’d misread her fear. “There are no space slugs anywhere to be seen and our doctor’s certified there are no microbes either. In that way it’s completely safe.”
She raised a skeptical eyebrow and he grinned. “Seriously though, we’ve had a lot of time to think about what kind of impact this will have on society. The real danger would be if word gets out accidentally. The significance of what we’ve discovered would shred what’s left of the Union.”
“Lately we’ve barely been hanging on by a thread,” she said.
“Exactly,” he said.
“If it’s not an alien life form, what is it you’ve found?” she asked.
Jeph frowned as he tried to figure out how much to explain. “Loosely you could call it an artifact, but that’s the understatement of all history. To understand why we had to bring you down here, you’re just going to need to see it with your own eyes.”
Katana: Assembly Dock Three: FleetCom Lunar L-2 Shipyard: Lunar Lagrange Two:
“Approach to Katana, you need to be moving. You’ve got thirty seconds and it’s getting hot out there.”
Saffia sat with her hand over the engine control waiting as Tana and Edison strapped in. They were on the deck below and should have been in hydrobags, but in their headlong rush to escape, they didn’t have time to fill them.
“Darling, you need to expedite things,” she said over the internal com. “We’re about to be sitting under the ass end of an extremely pissed off elephant.”
“Ten seconds,” Tana hollered. “I’m in my seat now.”
Saf watched through the front observation port as the glowing plume of reaction mass spread over their exit path. She couldn’t see the approaching ship yet, but they were cutting it close. Off to the side several workpods scurried for cover after having spent way too much time adding mooring lines to the Saber. The approaching vessel was so close they might not make it back inside before its exhaust wash flooded the bay.
The deck under her shuddered, crawling up from a slight vibration to a rumbling thunder.
“Katana watch for weapons fire to port, we’ve got interceptors drawing fire in that direction. Your best line …”
“Hit it!” Tana yelled.
“… is five degrees down and then break starboard once you clear their—”
The rest of what the approach control officer said was lost in the deafening roar of the Katana’s twin engines igniting. Saffia yanked the control yoke down and to the left to break free of the mooring arms and then snapped back to the right as they leapt through the outer edge of the approaching ship’s blast cone. They tumbled once, pulling a full 360 pinwheel. She stabilized their spin with a rolling twist that carried them back around below the ship. They were so close to the hull they could have counted the plating rivets, if they hadn’t been accelerating at close to ten-g.
Four seconds and they’d cover their first kilometer and under a minute and they’d be out of weapons range.
“Approach, where’s the second ship?” she asked, hooking their path upward along the skin of the big ship and twisting away from the shipyard.
“Behind you and drifting high. Interceptors are on it, but you’ve got the first one’s attention. It’s turning and you’ll be across its bow firing arcs.”
A bright flash to the far left indicated where one of the ship’s guns shredded an interceptor. She jinked down and pivoted away from the blast. As a B-class keel, the Katana might have been much larger than the interceptors, but what it sacrificed to size, it more than made up for in muscle. Once they got a straight line and weren’t wasting so much time on torquing the frame, she knew they’d ma
ke some serious legs. Another flash above her and she jerked their nose down.
She watched the chrono and the ranging radar with one eye while she tried to pick the most insane and unpredictable trajectory possible through the dogfight. An interceptor appeared in her forward observation port and she hissed, “Fragging move, idiot!” She slammed the yoke left and gasped as the smaller ship exploded in a blinding flash in front of her as a laser vaporized its hull. A split second later and it would have been them.
The area in front of the Katana was clear of ships and she stole a quick glance at the control console. The engines were still under limit and she debated pushing them up another notch into overburn. “Still alive back there?” she asked, thinking she might want to check before she kicked everyone in the eggs with any added intensity.
“Barely,” Tana grunted. “Edison’s down, but I think he’s still breathing.”
“Another twenty seconds and we should be out of range,” Saf said.
“Do what you’ve gotta do,” she said. “I can always glue him back together.”
Molten shards erupted in front of them and she felt a hissing shudder even over the engines. She caught a red blinking icon out of the corner of her eye. Long-range com failure. It had obviously been the com dish that took the hit. Saf twisted them into a corkscrew and making the decision to put escape over all else, she pushed the engines up and watched the acceleration add on another layer of pain.
“Sorry,” she said out loud as she laid her head back against the seat in resignation. The accelerometer eased upward of twelve-g and stayed there. “Hang in there Eddy.”
Hopefully, they’d remembered to stock the MedBay.
Armstrong: Station-keeping Above L-4 Prime:
Admiral Nakamiru stormed onto the hangar deck like a one man landing force.
When he was a young child, he’d watched the ceremony from Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park as they extinguished the Eternal Peace Flame that was to burn until nuclear weapons no longer threatened the world. At the ceremony, the founding members of the Union had signed a unilateral prohibition on keeping nuclear arsenals and it marked the beginning of the end of all war.
Fulcrum of Odysseus Page 20