Assassin's Orbit

by John Appel

  “I apologize, I worded that poorly.” Andini shrugged. “But we don’t yet have evidence of any link between the rebel faction those ships belong to and the nanoware.”

  “Why else would they react like this?”

  “Perhaps,” Andini said carefully, “a political faction notorious for their xenophobic worldview objected to the use of an antimatter bomb within their system.” She squared her shoulders. “And now, I really must insist you follow protocol and relocate to aux control.”

  Dinata allowed herself to be escorted off by the executive officer, whose unfortunate mission would be to babysit the minister during the course of the engagement. Andini took advantage of the brief respite to use the head before settling in to begin the largest space battle since the end of the Three-Planet War between Goa and Shenzen two decades past.

  By the time she returned from the head, the crew had just about finished securing the radiators. She strapped herself into her command couch and brought up her personal tactical plot. A second rebel force had changed vector to engage her ship. The sum of both rebel battle groups converging would be a challenging fight even for a SDV. But if she could defeat them in detail... Seizing the initiative was called for. “We’re not going to just sit here,” she said over the CIC net. “Fist, you and Legs give me a plot that closes with the first formation and lets us give them a proper paddling before that second squadron gets in range.”

  A bright orange line appeared, knifing right through the middle of the first rebel squadron. “Already plotted, Captain, and Chen gets to do my laundry for a week,” ‘Fist’, her tactical officer, said.

  “Chen, what course did you think I’d pick?”

  A purple trace leading away from both squadrons joined the display. “I thought you’d draw them into a running duel, Captain. Let them waste their misses against our point defense,” Chen, the maneuver officer— ‘Legs’—said.

  “There’s a lot more of them than there are of us, Chen, and the closest depot to resupply our PDCs is eight weeks a-space travel away.” She thumbed the authorization. “Execute.”

  Iwan Goleslaw rotated through two axes until its nose aligned with the new course while the acceleration warning blared. Then the main engines kicked into life, and the ship slammed forward from free fall to three and a half gs, its surrounding halo of weapon busses keeping pace like ducklings following their mother. The rebel formation shifted, adopting a computer-calculated, semi-chaotic dance as the ships executed the corkscrew-spiraling courses that made their exact positions more uncertain. Andini’s ship came at them like a knight atop a destrier riding into a mass of footmen.

  When the engagement timer reached zero, she thumbed the authorization tab again. “Weapons free,” she ordered, and death leapt forth.

  The opening rounds of the Battle of Ileri followed the course of most space engagements, with both sides pumping missiles at the other as their countermeasures tried to fool their opponent’s weapons. Brilliant lances shot out from laser-equipped ships, and counter-missiles rocketed out into the engagement volume. As the range closed, Iwan Goleslaw and the Ileri cruiser brought their particle beams into play, and then, at last, both sides resorted to their last lines of defense. Short-ranged point-defense cannons saturated the probability cones through which the incoming missiles had to pass with thousands of dumb slugs. They didn’t need to destroy the missiles, not entirely, just wreck their warheads, or their guidance systems, or their engines, letting the V-squared of the kinetic energy equation do the work.

  Andini’s first barrage took out half the Ileri cutters and one of the frigates, and then her first wave of weapon busses joined the fray. “Focus fire on the cruiser, Fist,” she ordered, and a half-dozen mass drivers opened up on the unlucky ship at virtually ‘can’t miss’ range for a space engagement. The Ileri ship cracked open like an egg smashed onto a countertop under the concentrated fire.

  The surviving frigates and cutters began to scatter before Iwan Goleslaw closed to effective range for its shipboard mass drivers. “All right, let’s deal with player two,” she said as her CIC crew cheered. The destruction seemed to satisfy even Dinata, who texted a congratulatory message.

  “We haven’t won yet,” she said to the tactical officer as they burned at a relatively sedate one-and-a-half gravities towards the second formation, which had prudently begun decelerating to allow additional rebel ships to join before engaging Iwan Goleslaw. “We caught the first group napping and it still cost seven percent of our ordnance.”

  “At that rate, Captain, we can take all the Ileri forces in the system and have three percent left over. And our beam weapons don’t need ammunition,” Fist said hopefully.

  Andini snorted. “You’re forgetting about the three rail guns.” The tactical officer had the good grace to look abashed. “We’re lucky they’re still under Vega’s control, though I wonder why she hasn’t used them on the rebels yet.”

  “Maybe she hopes some of the rebels will surrender, and she won’t have to destroy their ships?”

  “Perhaps.”

  The second stage of the engagement opened much as the first with missiles roaring forth. The results this time were somewhat less one-sided, though, and the SDV sustained several hits in exchange for smashing two Ileri frigates and several cutters. By this time, the rebels had committed nearly a third of their space force to attacking Iwan Goleslaw in what, in simulation at least, was something approaching an even fight.

  One truism of space combat is that everyone can see what’s going on, but very few can understand what’s happening. Tactical plots on every warship around Ileri displayed the known trajectories and probable maneuver cones of the now thousands of missiles, weapons busses, ships, and major pieces of debris. Expert systems kept watch on more distant objects because even well-trained and experienced human minds tend to focus on the near and immediate. The problem with that is that distant and fast-moving can become near and immediate before one realizes it.

  Andini angled her vessel away from the rebel flotilla, but that brought her track back into range of the surviving frigates from the first encounter. Those vessels, small and battered as they were, still had teeth. One of them had soft-launched a nuclear-tipped missile that drifted, engine stilled after its initial burst. The commander detonated the nuke in the middle of a pack of Saljuan weapon busses. This didn’t clear them out; nuclear weapons in space don’t inflict much damage to targets they aren’t in contact with, not in terms of blast anyway.

  But the radiation burst had the effect of blinding sensors, which allowed a mass-driver-armed rebel bus to approach undetected and fire on the SDV.

  Even this wouldn’t have been so bad except that Iwan Goleslaw was launching a fresh wave of weapons busses at that very moment. Two rounds struck an open launch port at four thousand meters per second, each five-kilogram projectile striking with forty million joules’ worth of energy—inside the Saljuan ship’s armor.

  The projectiles drilled a path of destruction nearly two meters in diameter through the ship. Fragmentation and secondary explosions extended the damage along the path even as every weapon in the launcher’s magazine detonated.

  SDVs are tough ships, though. Internal baffles and blow-out panels in the hull over the magazine contained the devastation to an extent. What might have been a killing shot on any lesser craft became, instead, “merely” a critical wound. In a flash, Andini lost one-fifth of her crew dead and another fifth to injuries. Fortunately for Andini and her crew, the remaining supply of conversion bombs weren’t in the affected areas, so the Saljuans weren’t converted into MC2 as the manufactory had been.

  Helmet sealed against the vacuum now engulfing her CIC, her damage-control board awash in red, Andini belted out an order. “Fist! Option Zed! Execute!” The battered ship shuddered as the remaining launchers spat the rest of their weapon busses into space, followed by the onboard missile launchers, which fired half their magazines. Waves of death poured forth from the stricken warship
.

  Wounded, battered, Iwan Goleslaw cut its way free of the rebel flotilla. Behind it, the second Ileri cruiser fought for its own life as its escorting ships died. Andini took scant pleasure in noting the death of the frigate that had gutted her ship as a fireball consumed it.

  Her comm pinged with an urgent message. Seeing it was from the surgeon and not, thankfully, Dinata, she answered. “What do you need, Bones?”

  The surgeon, a sour-faced man at the best of times, relayed the initial casualty reports based on the feeds from the crew’s djinns. Andini winced to hear the numbers. “Get the worst into stasis,” she ordered.

  “I can’t,” the surgeon said. “Bays six through ten were destroyed, and Gears tells me we don’t have power for the functioning bays, not enough, anyway. Both main and secondary heat exchangers are down, and tertiary is only running at thirty percent capacity.”

  “Shit.” Her heart sank into her stomach. Until the engineers could repair the heat exchangers, her ability to maneuver and fight was severely curtailed. Without cooking the remaining crew and systems, that was.

  “I can’t treat them all, Captain,” the man said plaintively. “We need to evacuate them.”

  Guns cut into the call. “Captain, the loyalist ships are maneuvering. It looks like they’re going to engage the rebels.”

  Andini switched her attention to the tactical plot, studying it intensely. What is Vega doing? Depending on which way the Fox of Tyngar turned her claws, the question of what to do with her wounded might be moot...

  The vectors took the shapes she hoped for, and her belly unclenched the slightest bit. “I’ll have to call Vega and ask for succor under the Accords,” she said. “But she owes us a favor. We just gave her the opening to go after the rebels.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Toiwa

  Thanh Victor Medical Center, Ileri Station,

  Forward Ring

  “Will he recover?” Toiwa practically pinned the doctor against the office wall.

  The man, clearly exhausted, flung up his hands. “He’ll survive, yes. He should recover fully from the shrapnel and gunshot wounds. But the spinal damage from being thrown into the pillar...” He shook his head. “We can do a lot, but it’s doubtful he’ll ever walk again without a medical exoskeleton.”

  “But you’re doing everything you can for him?”

  Her poking must have triggered something; the doctor straightened and squared his shoulders. “Governor, we are doing everything we can for all the casualties. Even the damned Saljuans you’ve foisted on us, and they’re a tremendous drain on our resources. We’ll be able to do more once our fabbers get back online to replenish our stocks. But there is some damage we simply can’t repair.”

  Kala Valverdes seemed to materialize by her elbow. “Governor, there’s an urgent personal call for you,” ze said.

  Her anger melted into fear like butter in a skillet. A personal call... she sent, not trusting herself to speak.

 

  Relief washed over her, and she suddenly felt both incredibly light, and as if the weight of her responsibilities would crush her.

  I will not fall apart in public. She breathed deeply before turning back to the doctor. “My apologies. I’m sure you and your staff are just as dedicated to your patients as my spouse is to his.”

  That seemed to mollify him, and after asking if there was anything else her office could do for him, she asked if there was some place she could take a private call. “Use my office,” he said, and left to continue managing the chaos. Valverdes followed him out, closing the door. She glimpsed Chijindu’s bulk as he placed himself squarely in front of it.

  She opened the link to see all three of them, Eduardo and the kids, packed into a smaller version of her borrowed office in the north ring med center. Eduardo cried openly as he told her about seeing one of his co-workers gunned down by rebels as they cut off the med center. Her daughter, her arm thrown protectively over her little brother’s shoulder, related the hair-raising tale of their flight through the station’s streets, just steps ahead of the rebels, in a matter-of-fact tone, as if she was summarizing the contents of a vid she’d watched for class. Toiwa’s heart threatened to burst; she’d failed to protect not just the citizens in her care, but the people she loved most in the world.

  She asked her son for his version of events, and he just grinned at her. “We knew you’d kick their asses, Mom,” he said, and then the tightness in her chest gave way and she cried at last, and they all cried and laughed until Chijindu knocked circumspectly on her office door. Both he and Valverdes let her collect herself on the trip back to HQ.

  They arrived to find Zheng overseeing the preparations for the medically enhanced interrogation of the prisoners from her daring raid. Toiwa’s misgivings about crossing that threshold had faded as the stakes escalated exponentially. Antimatter weapons had that sort of effect, she supposed. But deep inside, she knew she was trading away a piece of her soul she’d never get back. She didn’t know if learning what Mizwar knew would balance that, but it was her job to follow this path wherever it went. She stared at a projection of the man himself, stripped down to a medical undergarment, tubes inserted at half a dozen points of his body, and tried to fathom how this man’s acts had been the match to set her world aflame.

  Not that we weren’t primed to go off on our own. We just didn’t know it.

  She watched from the observation suite down the hall as the medtechs fit a close-fitting cap over the prisoner’s newly shaved head while others slipped mesh booties over bare feet. Fathya Shariff stood beside her,

  eyes fixed on the monitors, her gaze unrelenting. “You want justice for your grandson,” Toiwa said softly.

  “I want truth,” Shariff said.

  Toiwa hoped they found some. She touched Shariff’s elbow. “I’m glad our people were able to fulfill my promise to find your grandson’s killer.”

  “It was Daniel’s promise, as I recall,” Shariff said,

  her voice pitched low. “Though you did promise to devote every resource.” She nodded at the screen. “You and yours have certainly done all I could ask.”

  Zheng called from her post beside the prisoner’s gurney. “Governor? We’re ready to begin.”

  “One moment, Lieutenant.” She turned to the others in the observation suite. Ogawa, the Commonwealth operative, sat next to Okereke, talking in low voices to each other as they watched the proceedings. Teng, the Directorate Captain, hovered nearby. The missing member of their team, Fari Tahir, was ensconced in a treatment room down the hall. Kala Valverdes sat unobtrusively in the corner, while Chijindu warded the doorway. “They’re ready to begin in there,” she said. “What we learn here will be covered under the Secrets Act. Are you all prepared for that?”

  “Damned straight,” said Okereke, as the others murmured their affirmations.

  “Please proceed, Lieutenant,” she said, and turned to watch the screen.

  Mizwar’s supine form filled the middle display. Windows around it displayed data feeds: voice stress analysis, brain-activity readings, facial-expression analysis, pupillary-dilation scans, and a transcript of the questions and responses. Everything by the book, logged and auditable should the day come this testimony ever appeared before a magistrate. Assuming Vega didn’t throw the man and his fellows into an oubliette somewhere.

  The medtechs adjusted the flow of medication into Mizwar’s system, a cocktail of inhibition-reducing drugs, relaxants, and gods knew what else along with the nanosurgeons at work repairing his hand. After a moment, the lead medic gave Zheng the go signal and she began her gentle questioning.

  Normally one started with things you could verify to be true or false, and Maria Zheng kept to that protocol. She was hampered by the limited amount of genuine facts they had about Mizwar and his activities, causing her to run through their scant supply of known truths rather quickly. But the medtech signa
led when they adequately established a baseline, and Zheng began to dig in earnest.

  “Why did you kill Minister Ita and the Commonwealth Consul?” she asked.

  “Collateral damage,” Mizwar said. “Though he was likely already tainted.”

  “So, someone else was your target?”

  Mizwar’s head bobbed slightly. “Akindele and Wiwei were my primary targets,” he said.

  “Who were they?”

  “Two of the businesspeople Ita and the Consul met with at the Second Landing Social Club.”

  “Why did you target them?” Zheng asked.

  “Because my team discovered that they were infected,” he said.

  “Infected with what?”

  “The Unity Plague.”

  That stopped Zheng dead in her tracks, and Toiwa felt her stomach drop, the way she’d felt when Vega told her she was the senior government official left on Ileri Station.

  “I was afraid of that,” Valverdes said. Toiwa’s head jerked around.

  “Hold on a moment, Lieutenant,” she ordered. She eyed Kala warily. “Yes?”

  Kala swallowed visibly before continuing. “Governor, I had the staff do a workup on Councilor Walla and the other prisoners who consented to testing.” Ze stopped, looking nervous, and seemed to have trouble meeting Toiwa’s eyes for a moment. “I also... Hm. I, well, used your authorizations to request analysis from a special lab once we got the forward-spindle comm array working.”

  Seems I’m not the only one who’s compromised their values over this. Toiwa turned, slowly, and looked Valverdes in the eye. “What special lab?”

  Kala seemed to find zer resolve. “The one M. Ogawa was posted to before she came to the station, after the murders. On asteroid 351 Juliette.”

  From Ogawa’s sharply indrawn breath, Toiwa gathered Kala was treading some very dangerous ground. Her eyes flicked to the Commonwealth woman. “And the nature of that facility?”

  Ogawa glanced at Teng, who shrugged as if to say, “Why not?”