Packmule

by Blaze Ward

  “So you land, and find a D-type hull in miraculously-perfect shape, requiring only fuel and you can escape forever, bringing down the terrible angels of vengeance on this planet,” he said, letting his voice range out of simple explanation and take on some storytelling elements. “You fuel it from your first ship, power everything on, and take off.”

  “And the damned thing explodes on you as soon as you light the engines, doesn’t it?” Dunklin asked.

  “I would not put it past them,” Granville said. “Especially since all the other ships we have found have been in such poor shape. A Trojan Horse, in reverse, if you will. What were the missile magazines like?”

  “Full,” Dunklin hissed. “Fourteen birds that looked like they were in good shape.”

  “All the better,” Granville growled. “Wouldn’t you want such a grand ship to help you get home?”

  “Where’s the bomb?” Markus growled back.

  “It could be anywhere,” Granville admitted. “Maybe an engine overload. Maybe a generator with a failsafe disabled. Possibly the missiles in the tubes will detonate in place, setting off a chain reaction. If we had forever, we could take the ship apart and find it. When we come back, we will. But it’s not worth looking today.”

  “What are your suggestions, Centurion?” Heather asked in an interested voice.

  Technically, it was her mission. Her job. Her command. But she was, as the saying went, willing to sell him as much rope as he wanted to buy.

  And Granville was feeling awfully greedy today.

  “Fourteen missiles in the racks?” he asked.

  “Plus five more in the other hulls,” Markus replied, tiredness suddenly wiped clean. His eyes even looked brighter. “Like those bastards emptied as many as they needed, in order to reload the trap for us.”

  Granville turned to Heather, Siobhan, and Kam, the engineers suddenly witnesses, but not central agents.

  “Remove all the missiles and get them into the containers on Saddlebags,” he said. “Yamaguchi swaps for Highway and flies it down for the second run. We try to strip as much gear as we can from the carcasses, while the other team puts together a C-type hull from parts to give us a second warship. We don’t get greedy at that point, instead sailing off to Lighthouse Station and caching as much as we can there. At some point, we either attempt a prison break, or run for Imperial Space and get help.”

  “Then why the missiles?” Heather asked.

  “They’re just as useful blowing up a station somewhere else,” Granville said, his voice rising. “Same Trojan Horse gambit with an insertion shuttle. Maybe we go find a luxury liner or an empty troop transport and bring it back here.”

  “Are you too angry or tired to make rational decisions, Centurion?” she fired back. It was like cold water on his neck.

  “No,” he said after a moment of consideration. “Those men have been sentenced to death under an alien sun, Commander. Slow death, perhaps, but they are never going home, unless we build a yellow-brick-road for them. How many thousands of men do you suppose have disappeared from Imperial space over the last two generations?”

  “Too many,” she agreed. “But I want you calm, rational, and deadly. Having a second warship means that Phil can extend his campaign across a wider front. Or it means that we can run for home and get help. But he’ll make that decision.”

  She turned to include more of the group. Everyone was indoors now, helmets off and listening.

  “Everyone eats now, and then racks for eight hours,” she ordered the room. “Tomorrow, Siobhan, Kam, Granville, and I are going to work you like dogs.”

  Granville nodded at the general groans from the room.

  Tomorrow, was going to be a significant step forward.

  He had seven years of misery that he owed someone.

  Intruder (October 14, 402)

  “All hands to battle stations,” the voice came through the speaker by the hatch, boosting Phil up out of his sleep cycle and towards the hatch before he was even fully awake. He grabbed his tunic from the chair at the foot of the bed and slid his feet into shoes, and then exited his cabin at nearly a dead run.

  It wasn’t far to the bridge from the Command Centurion’s cabin, by design, but he didn’t want to stop even long enough to put on his tunic. He could do that when he was on station.

  Yeoman Lovisone had the watch right now. Good pilot, damned fine sailor. Not ready to engage in a war without some serious backup.

  “West, what’s the situation?” Phil called to the man as he entered the bridge.

  He threw himself into his station and powered all the boards live. Sensors had been left in passive mode for days, drinking from the river of data without adding any ripples to the water. All four gun crews showed green, as much good as that would do. If someone was coming, 405 would probably have to run, rather than fight. Still, the crew was tight, even as short-handed as they were running right now.

  “Signal from the top edge of the system, sir,” West called. “New vessel just jumped into a spot directly above Mansi-B from somewhere. Signal’s several hours old at this point, so hopefully he dropped down into B’s orbit and we just haven’t seen him yet.”

  Phil considered the scenario. It sounded reasonable, except that this was a prison planet, and a secret one. He suspected that the newcomer was parked out there waiting permission to close, instead of just appearing on the horizon.

  Still, the boards showed it, sitting about five light-hours out, exactly north from Mansi-B, so they knew where they were going. Hopefully, he was just a small asteroid in Mansi-D’s vicinity from where the intruder was.

  That was the problem with JumpSpace. You could move around faster than signals intelligence could keep up, Noise you emitted rippled outward at light speed, ghosts appearing and disappearing on scanners. CS-405 might not know they’d been spotted until someone emerged on top of them and opened fire.

  Phil double-checked, but West hadn’t raised shields. Those were the standing orders that only he or Evan could override, but sometimes your training took over and automatic actions happened.

  Here, that would get them seen. And then things would get bad.

  Worse, he wasn’t over the landing site right now. 405 and Packmule were below the horizon from Heather and Siobhan for another seven hours.

  He opened a line to the other ship as he pulled his tunic on and sealed it.

  “Packmule, this is Kosnett,” he said, his voice a little quieter than normal, even though they were speaking on a direct laser that should be impossible to detect. “What is your status?”

  “Hands poised over the magic button,” Andre Gave replied immediately. “Awaiting orders.”

  “Stay quiet for now,” Phil said. “If anything jumps over here, run as soon as you detect their emergence. In a pinch, Siobhan can fly the ground crew out, and Heather can navigate the big beast back down for a second run if we get one.”

  “Affirmative, Phil,” Andre said. “Heather left me a plot that gets me back to Bok, in case the worst happens.”

  “Roger that,” Phil said. “Stand by.”

  He cut the line and watched his boards as the data got processed. Evan came through the hatch at a dead run, sliding into his station and punching buttons rapidly, speeding up information flow.

  According to the data they had, a Hammerhead had just come out of jump. Well, five hours ago. Their next jump should put them close in to Mansi-B, if 405 and Packmule went undetected. With all externals turned off, they should be invisible to anybody not pinging this immediate vicinity hard.

  There, Buran had something of an edge. A Hammerhead was an escort vessel, about the size of the old destroyer Sofia he had served on, fresh out of school. Half again bigger than CS-405, and several times more heavily-armed, but the ships also had some scouting capabilities.

  Buran used Hammerheads as jacks of all trades: escorts, scouts, patrol. Hopefully, the Director over there wasn’t paranoid enough to look at the junkyard before sailing
to his destination.

  “Evan, West, on emergence of any vessel, bring shields to full power immediately,” Phil ordered. “Gun crews, as soon as you have a target, open fire with everything you’ve got.”

  As pitifully small as that might be. Still, they might get lucky. And luck counted for more than skill in almost any game, war included.

  Green lights.

  Phil settled in to wait. There wasn’t anything he could do at this point, except hope he got lucky.

  Efficiency.

  Phil had to give them that. The intruder had sat patiently out there. Five hours had passed since he had appeared on sensors. Long enough for a message from Mansi-B to get back out to him. He then appeared just outside the gravity well edge of Mansi-B, just about where an Aquitaine squadron would have.

  Phil suspected the Director of the Hammerhead was following orders, and had dropped exactly into the center of a killing zone. That’s where all his guns would have optimized, if he was in command over there.

  CS-405 was slightly broached, just peeking out from the bottom of Three. That sort of piloting worked to their advantage, too. Buran tended to fly above solar systems and enter them from the north, whereas Aquitaine flew in direct lines as much as possible.

  Jessica Keller had taught the squadron to stay south as much as possible, and that tended to hide them better.

  It had apparently worked here.

  As Phil watched, the Hammerhead intruder slowly made its way in towards the closest station and docked.

  Evan had tentatively marked that one as belonging to the commander of the system, based on the amount of signals traffic emanating from it, compared to the other seven.

  It would be Phil’s target, if they ever launched a surprise attack.

  “Packmule, this is 405,” Phil said, opening a line.

  It had to suck over there, with only two crew on the vessel right now and having to do everything, while still staying ready to run at the first sign of trouble.

  “Janowski,” the engineer replied. “Andre’s taking a nap. Should I wake him?”

  “Negative, Dedra,” Phil said. “Intruder has docked with the station, so you can relax some. Unless they crash jump from the dock itself, we’ll have a few minutes warning between the time we see them undock and the time they could get to a normal jump location. Next time, remind me to send a couple of spare folks over so you can keep better sleep schedules.”

  “That would be nice, boss,” Dedra replied.

  Nobody had considered that with only two people on the ship, they would end up on twelve and twelve schedules at a minimum, cut even shorter when something went wrong.

  Like now.

  Two hours until he had a direct line to the ground and could feed them an update. At least nobody down there was going to move, without a notice from him. Hopefully, he didn’t have to overfly them at high speed, warning them of an intruder at the same time that he was leading the hounds right over their location.

  Mechanic (October 14, 402)

  The joy of impact wrenches and prybars, as Granville surveyed the scene from the cockpit of Caravan. Galin and Markus had gone at the wreck of number one with a vengeance, once he showed them how to identify the panels covering the twenty-centimeter bolts holding the two frames together.

  Kam and a handful of others had used a stack of stolen bar and beam stock to build a crane-like attachment on the middle section. It wouldn’t allow them to lift the ship, but it would let them control things.

  Heather turned and faced him across the vast yard, both hands up, just in case he wasn’t paying attention to the woman.

  “Caravan, stand by,” she said over the short range radio.

  Heavy cables had been strung under the front section of the derelict and laced together like a net, passing through rings welded on first thing this morning.

  “All set,” Granville replied, confirming that nothing had moved off center on any gauge in the last thirty seconds.

  “Caravan, begin your lift,” Heather continued. “Bear your nose on me and then prepare to walk forward.”

  Here was the time when an insertion shuttle showed its value over anything short of a tugboat. Pure maneuverability. Granville eased the controller up a hair at a time, bringing the ship up onto its toes, and then lifting clear of the ground.

  Up a meter. Two. Five and hold.

  He set the autopilot to maintain this distance from the ground and slowly rotated himself counterclockwise until Heather was in line with where guns could parallax, if he had any.

  Her hands began to move, a complex signaling language he had taught her, based on what he had learned from his old flight crews, and from a bunch of Mongolian cowboys needing to herd restive cattle.

  He approached her at a slow walk. There was no breeze today, so it was easier than normal. Almost like docking in orbit, where the only thing you had to address was relative closure rates.

  Her hands crossed overhead, and Granville eased into a clean hover. The repulsors kicked up a little dust, but not much, as they had selected a rocky flat to try this from first.

  “Cable crew, begin your approach,” Heather called over the radio.

  Granville cycled one of his screens to show the underside of the shuttle. Three engineers dragged hooked cables under the ship and attached them to a ring specifically engineered to be the lowest center of gravity, so that an insertion shuttle could lift a massive weight without tilting.

  He would have never dared a stunt like this in an administrative shuttle.

  One, two, three hooks attached and locked, and the crew backed away quickly.

  “Caravan, this is your Ground Controller,” Heather continued in a heavy, serious voice. “Prepare to maneuver.”

  “Acknowledged, Ground Control,” Granville said.

  Now, things got tricky.

  Markus’s truck was parked in a line with the bow of the derelict, several cables attached to the front winch. Markus would do the pulling, but Granville had to lift the entire weight of the front end and hold everything steady while the redneck worked.

  “Forward ten, up twenty, Caravan,” Heather ordered.

  “Forward ten, up twenty,” Granville acknowledged.

  Forward slowly, lifting to a programmed height of twenty-five meters. He could trust the shuttle’s computer to handle that part. What came after required human intervention. It would all be touch.

  “Hold there, Caravan,” Heather said.

  Granville looked at the image from below. Three cables as thick as his thigh bones hung down, but remained loose yet. One on each side of the target, just forward from the frame lines. The last one hooked to where a bowsprit would have been, had this been a maritime ship.

  “Caravan, forward two, and adjust for a five kph drift from starboard,” Heather ordered.

  Not much breeze, but enough to push him sideways, ever so slightly.

  “Caravan, you appear to be centered,” Heather said. “Confirm.”

  Down view looked good. All cables appeared to have the same amount of slack. Autopilot was holding him as close to mathematical center as they had been able to identify.

  “Ground Control, this is Caravan,” Granville said. “Confirm centering.”

  “Begin your lift, Caravan,” she ordered. “Slow and steady.”

  Back on the controller using the buttons on the screen, rather than the stick itself. One tap at a time, measured in decimeters of altitude.

  The ship groaned a little as the cables came taut. He added one last tap and held it there. The front of the ship would probably shift a little, if they held this for an hour, but for now, the weight would be mostly off of the bolts.

  “Ground Control, I have positive hold,” Granville said.

  “Stand by, Caravan,” she answered. “Towtruck, begin to take in your slack.”

  Granville watched the winch on Markus’s truck turn very slowly, pulling those cables in and winding them.

  Contact.

  Tw
o musical instruments in the afternoon sun, one horizontal, one vertical.

  “Ground Control, all slack taken in,” Markus called in a heavy voice.

  “Caravan, take me up one-tenth and hold,” Heather ordered carefully.

  Granville eased the autopilot up another notch. He couldn’t see a difference below, but the engines beneath him revved at a higher pitch with the extra effort.

  “Hold there, Caravan,” she called. “Towtruck, apply positive pressure now.”

  “Initiating,” Markus answered.

  They had anchored the truck to the ground with spikes driven more than a meter into the rock, but Granville still watched those cables come tight as the winch pulled.

  “Spotters, give me an update,” Heather called.

  “One, negative,” Galin answered.

  “Two, negative,” Zubaida chimed in a moment later.

  No movement from the ship. That was always the risk with something like this. The ship might have flash-welded at the seam when it was hit. Or somehow rusted internally.

  They just might not be able to break it loose.

  “Ground Control, this is Caravan,” Granville said as he looked at the situation. “Stand by. I want to try something.”

  “What’s coming, Caravan?”

  “I will try to rock it loose vertically, Ground Control,” he said.

  “Be careful,” Heather ordered.

  “Will do.”

  Granville eased the autopilot up another notch. Nothing moved, but the lifters changed pitch.

  Down two blips.

  Up two blips.

  The machine had a lag built in. It had just started to ease off when the second command hit and the engines surged. The symphony around him wasn’t an opera, but it wasn’t experimental jazz, either.

  “Two, I have movement,” Zubaida called suddenly.

  “Negative on one, still,“ Galin answered.

  “Everybody on your toes,” Granville ordered. “I’m going to rock it sideways a little.”

  “Don’t shear any bolts, Caravan,” Heather said.

  He grinned. The only bolts he was likely to shear were on his shuttle, not the cutter below him.