by Rick Partlow
“Activating automatic computer translation,” the blonde woman said.
The screen divided into thirds, the tactical display, the planet, and now, a face. It was a woman, the line of her jaw a bit softer than the other Tevynians I’d run into, her green eyes set close together, red hair parted in the middle and wound into intricate braids. Her mouth was small, and when it moved, no sound came out for a moment as the computer analyzed her words and vocal patterns and used them to simulate her speaking to us in English.
“I am Captain Andraste of the Confederation warship Tip of the Spear.” The computer version of her voice was haughty, proud, and just a little too puffed-up about being the commander of a tiny little in-system gunboat in the middle of nowhere. “We are not detecting your transponder. If you are a Tevynian vessel, identify yourself immediately.”
“Of course, they wouldn’t be able to tell,” Olivera mused, half to himself but I could still catch the gist of it. “One cruiser pretty much looks like another.” He glanced back at me and a smile spread across his face. “I think I might take a page from your book, Major Clanton.” He turned back to the communications officer. “Lt. Adams, run my voice through an auto-translator and send this message, audio only. Starting in five, four, three….” Olivera stopped speaking the countdown and folded his fingers, as if he was an old-timey TV cameraman. “I am Captain Vercingetorix,” he said, “of the Confederacy warship Oathkeeper. We were badly damaged in the battle at Helta Prime and have only now made it back to Tevynian space. We are in need of repairs.”
He slashed his fingers across his throat in a kill signal and Adams nodded.
“That means cut the transmission,” I told her, helpfully. “Not that we’re dead.”
It was a test and Adams passed, laughing to herself as she sent the message.
“Oh, good God,” Julie moaned. “Andy’s found a fellow nerd.”
“That’s my favorite movie,” Adams remarked. “Message sent, sir.”
“Julie,” Olivera said, still smiling, “on my signal, be ready to go right through the middle of them at maximum acceleration. If you can pass close enough for the wake of our drive field to take out one or two, even better. Davis,” he said to the tactical officer, “if any of them happen to be in the firing arc of our impulse gun, be prepared to fire, but I want you to target the lead vessel with the particle cannon. Tevynian group commanders lead from the front, so that’s where Captain Andraste will be. The second I tell helm to go, open fire. You copy?”
“Yes, sir,” Davis said, sounding eager to get into the fight, which probably meant it was his first.
Well, it was the first for a lot of people, and even the old veterans like Olivera and Julie only had a bare handful of space battles. We’d been lucky so far. Well, luck combined with the fog of war and strategic and tactical surprise. But that wouldn’t last forever. I hoped Olivera was as smart as he thought he was.
“She’s replying, sir,” Adams informed him.
“I have no record of an Oathkeeper,” Andraste said, the computer simulation of her voice adding the wary skepticism it had detected in the original Tevynian. “Nor of a Captain Vercingetorix.”
“Well, damn Tevynian record-keeping,” Olivera said, his smile twisting into a sour frown. “Who’d have thought the savages would be that efficient about paperwork?” He motioned at Adams. “Send this. This vessel was recently seized from the Helta shipyards and repurposed for the needs of the Confederacy. I had the honor of a field promotion when my own commander died a glorious death in battle.”
I snorted a laugh I couldn’t quite hold in.
“Yeah, that sounds like a Tevynian,” I agreed.
“I studied the interrogation tapes from the prisoner,” he told me. “Know your enemy and all that.”
The reply was a long time coming and while they weren’t currently shooting at us, I began to wonder if the delay was worth it if it gave them more time to ready their defenses. But finally…
“Oathkeeper, heave to and prepare to receive a shuttle from my ship. If they confirm you are who you say you are, we will guide you to Lunar orbit and assist you in making repairs.”
“Sir!” Davis exclaimed, almost stepping on the end of Andrate’s words. “I just picked up our ship! She’s in Lunar orbit, powered way down. Barely any reactor signature at all, no drive readings.”
“Out of fuel,” he surmised. “And they haven’t converted her into one of theirs yet. So maybe there’s a reason for that.” He nodded to Adams. “Last message. Captain Andrate, we will comply with your order. Send your shuttle now.” He indicated the end of the message with a wave of his hand. “Send it. Julie, Davis….” He waited a few seconds, until it was clear Adams had sent the signal. “…now!”
What happened next was hard to follow, even with the screen back to just two views—one for tactical, one for helm. When you can accelerate at close to a hundred gravities, well, let’s just say the Jambo would have broken the quarter-mile record at most dragstrips. We went from about as close to motionless as you can get while under the gravitational influence of assorted celestial bodies to zooming right into the midst of the enemy ships in seconds.
Captain Andrate seemed like a woman who was on the ball, who would have figured out what was going on really fast and given orders to counter it. Unfortunately for her, the Jambo happened to have the bow pointed directly at her, and that gave her the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be on the receiving end of a tungsten slug the size of a Volkswagen Beetle traveling at low relativistic velocities.
The Point of the Spear disappeared in a supernova flare of liberated kinetic energy, almost whiting out the pale blue glow of the particle cannon seeking the next closest spherical ship. The show wasn’t quite as dramatic, but the globe of white light blossoming off the port side of the ship couldn’t have done them any good.
Lasers began to target us and warning klaxons sounded as the drive field began to attenuate under the influx of energy, but Olivera remained stolid and stone-faced in his captain’s chair. Either he was just as cool and commanding as Naval commanders of old, or he was determined to pretend he was so as not to give satisfaction to those who wished the Navy had been given command of the Jambo instead of the Space Force.
Which I didn’t care about, but I sure as hell thought we should have gone with the Space Marines instead of the damned Space Rangers.
We passed within about a hundred klicks of another ship and gravimetic tidal forces from our drive field ripped strips of armor hundreds of meters long off their hull, jets of flame shooting out where the atmosphere escaped and caught fire.
A shudder went through the ship and I knew from unfortunate experience that it was our drive field losing power from the battering of a very powerful energy weapon.
“We’re taking long range fire from their Lunar base,” Davis warned.
“Micro-jump, Julie,” Olivera ordered. “Get me to the other side of their moon.”
Oh, damn. I hated micro-jumps.
“Jumping now,” Julie announced. “Hold onto your lunch.”
That was the hard part, because the psychic slingshot feeling of the jump came not once but twice in the space of a couple seconds and the whole bridge—the whole universe—seemed to shimmer and haze over and I couldn’t make out what was on the screens, if there was anything on the screens. Someone’s voice was buzzing in my ear and I wondered how they’d recovered so much faster than I had. Didn’t seem fair.
“We’re still being targeted by the Lunar defense laser!”
Davis. That was Davis, I knew it even if I couldn’t quite focus on him, because he’d be the one making the pronouncement.
“Helm, give control to tactical.” Olivera’s voice was slurred, which made me feel better. At least someone else was having as bad a time as I was. “Let’s see what the impulse gun can do about that laser battery.”
“Tactical, you have the conn,” Julie said. I laughed. That was a Navy thing, but Julie was form
er Navy and was doing everything she could to bring nautical terminology into the lexicon of starship commands because, as she so eloquently put it, fuck the Air Force.
My vision cleared as Davis acknowledged the switch-over.
“Tactical has the conn.”
The view on the screen was radically different than it had been just a few moments ago. The planet and its moon were unbelievably close, the sensor dots of the remaining defense boats distant and invisible on the optical scopes, and the entire screen was shaking, vibrating in tune with the superstructure of the ship, which meant the drive field was taking way too much energy and was about to destabilize.
The view drifted slightly to port and a glowing, red reticle came to rest over the computer outline of a Tevynian military station on the surface of the moon.
“Firing.”
The ship shuddered again and in the time that it took me to blink, the Lunar base was gone. I couldn’t really see the facility, not from orbit, but I saw the plume of burning gas and dust rising up kilometers above it, like the puff of a bullet hitting the dirt four hundred yards away.
“The target has been serviced,” Davis said in his finest Air Force bullshit euphemism, as if throwing it in Julie’s face for trying to make the Space Force like her Navy.
“Take us into a matching orbit with our starship, Julie,” Olivera ordered. “Major Clanton, Colonel Brooks…I believe you’re up. Get us back our ship.”
Chapter Six
“Everyone strapped in?” Captain Lee asked, craning his head back from the cockpit. “Are we a go for launch?”
I did one final visual go-over of the Delta team and got a thumbs-up from Pops.
“Security team is a go,” I told him.
“Rangers are a go!” Lt. Landry was trying to be extra enthusiastic to make up for what he considered the horrible personal failure of being nervous before his first mission leading the Ranger platoon. At least that was my take on it. His platoon was backing us up, and we had another platoon of Rangers on standby in the bird carrying the load of reactor fuel, but most of this mission was going to be on us.
“Gunfighter One is a go, Jambo,” Lee said. “Launching now.”
Leaving the ship’s hangar bay always reminded me of the only time I had launched into space the old-fashioned way, aboard what they used to call the disintegrating totem pole—that is, on the end of a rocket. Of course, that description wasn’t quite accurate for Daniel Gatlin’s Single-Stage-to-Orbit system, since his rockets didn’t disintegrate and, in fact, landed intact for reuse, but it was a cool turn of phrase and the rule of cool trumps all else when you’re a science fiction writer.
But the similarities were numerous. On the ship, we had the semblance of Earth-normal gravity thanks to the grav plates, and the absence of the discomfort of acceleration because our drives weren’t controlled by Newton’s Laws. Leaving the Jambo meant reverting to old-fashioned throw-shit-out-the-back-to-make-you-go-forward physics and abandoning gravity control for the wonderful feeling of God grinding you under his heel for daring to boost at six gravities.
Trying to distract myself from the heavy boost, I wondered what Gatlin was doing now. I used to see him at briefings in the President’s own version of the Western White House, or sometimes in the real one, but then it had changed to teleconferencing and lately, I hadn’t seen him or talked to him at all. Olivera assured me that Daniel Gatlin was hip-deep in building the planet a real space transportation system—not just a few military shuttles, not just the slapped-together heavy cargo lifters we’d been using to build our military fleet, but enough cargo and passenger birds to turn us into a real, spacefaring civilization.
It had been his dream, and I knew from interviews I’d seen online that he’d never expected to see it in his lifetime. Now, not only would he realize his dream within a few years, but his lifetime was going to be a lot longer than he’d thought. Mine too, unless I wound up getting killed galivanting around other star systems inviting aliens to shoot at me.
“We taking any fire from the ship?” I squeezed the words out past the pressure from the boost on my chest, trying to force my eyes to focus on the targeting display on the main screen.
Lee dialed back the acceleration with a flick of his fingers and the elephant crawled off of my chest, leaving me breathing easier at near a single standard gravity. With the boost pressure gone, I could see the display clearly. The ship—and God knows the President was right, we needed to call her something else because that was getting old—hung silent and motionless on the cockpit display, but she was outfitted with coil guns as point-defense turrets, and the shuttle’s radar and lidar might not pick up slugs from those until it was too late.
“Nothing yet,” Lt. Habib told me from the gunner’s position. “I don’t think they have the juice to shoot at us.”
“Yeah,” Captain Lee agreed. “According to the mission brief, they’re probably burning fumes in the reactor. Should barely have enough to run life support and the grav plates.”
“Thank God for government efficiency for once,” Pops commented, hands and attention on his KE rifle, running a last-minute functions check. “It would have made all the sense in the world just to fill the fuel tanks up to the top and not have to worry about it again for a few months. It’s not like metallic hydrogen fuel pellets go bad or something. But some fucking bureaucrat decided that since the ship only had to make a test run out to Alpha Centauri and back, well, by God, that’s how much fuel we’re going to allocate her.”
“Nobody tell them that, okay?” Corporal Quinn said from the row of seats behind the Delta team. “I’d hate for the Pentagon bean counters to get the idea they’re actually useful.”
A round of chuckles came from the Delta team, which wasn’t the norm. They’d accepted the Rangers as fellow professionals, but they didn’t generally bullshit with them. But Quinn and a few others had sort of been accepted as honorary members of the team since they were always sharing a shuttle with us. Not Lt. Landry, at least not yet, but there was always hope.
“They don’t have any shuttles,” I said. “Or at least they didn’t when they left. Which means the only opposition we’re going to face is inside the ship.”
“As long as the Jambo can keep the enemy ships off our back,” Lee reminded me.
“Captain,” Habib warned him, “I’m picking up a squadron of fighters in the planet’s atmosphere. If they’re dual-environment, they’ll be hitting orbit in a couple minutes.”
Lee regarded him with the sort of scowl one of my DI’s from boot camp reserved for a boot who’d said something particularly stupid.
“How much reaction mass do you think those things carry, Habib?” he asked. “They’re like half our size! And we’re on their fucking moon! Even assuming they could keep a one-g boost going the whole time, which they can’t without going bingo fuel halfway here, it would take them like three hours to reach Lunar orbit. I’m pretty confident we’ll be gone by then, but I’ll warn the cargo boat just in case.”
“Sorry,” Habib said, turning a bit red. “I didn’t think about how far it was.”
“That’s okay, you’re a gunner,” Lee consoled him. “I wouldn’t expect you to be a space pilot just yet.”
“Space pilot,” I murmured, shaking my head. “Jesus Christ, it’s like we’re living in a 1950s movie serial. Lee, are those codes still working?”
We were close now, the aft end of the Coalition Starship Horse With No Name, as I was unofficially christening her, swelling in our screen, the hangar bay yawning dark and empty and airless ahead of us. They hadn’t had the power to maintain the field to hold in the air and none of them were bright enough to close the emergency bay doors, so they’d just turned off the lights and shut the vacuum seals on the internal locks and hoped for the best. Which was a very Russian thing for the Chinese to do.
Which also meant, I hoped, that none of them had been forward thinking enough to change the security codes since they’d arrived.
“We’re about to find out,” he said. “Brace for high-g deceleration.”
The shuttle spun end for end and I closed my eyes, knowing what was coming.
They say that nine gees is the max the average pilot can take without blacking out, but even getting close to that mark without losing consciousness requires either a special suit that squeezes the blood from your extremities back to your brain or special training to tighten your core muscles in just the right way and at just the right time. I had neither of those and if we’d even hit eight gees for any length of time, I would have passed out.
I didn’t, though I did begin to experience tunnel vision and hazy thinking, so I assumed we were braking at just under my limit, but it seemed to go on for hours. When it cut off, the cessation of pressure was so abrupt I nearly decorated the inside of my helmet, but I was distracted by the violent thump of the landing gear smacking against the hangar bay deckplates.
“Gravity still works,” Lee observed. “Now, let’s see if the security codes do.”
He tapped a virtual keypad and the hangar bay lights flashed on, followed closely by a vibration up through the landing gear, not a noise because there was no air to conduct it, but the unmistakable grinding of metal on metal. We’d landed nose out in the hangar bay and the view from the forward cameras showed the curtain-like hangar bay doors sliding shut, unfolding like an accordion from one side to the other until the grinding ended with a solid thump, and they were sealed.
“Repressurizing the bay now,” he said, his fingers stroking a set of controls.
“All right!” I said, unstrapping from my acceleration couch and rolling out to face the rest of the armored troops on board. “Everybody up! Just like we rehearsed. Pops, you take the security team to engineering, secure it until the flight crew comes in with the fuel boat. Rangers, you’re with me and we are heading for the bridge.” Which was mostly because I didn’t want a bunch of Rangers shooting up the engine room. There was some fragile stuff in there and we needed it to work if we were going to sail this ship out of here. “If you encounter any hostiles on the way to your objective, do your best to take them prisoner, but not at the risk of the mission. Number one priority is getting this ship back. Got me?”