If there’d ever been a time to dissolve into panicked despair, this was it. Rob up there risking his life again, herself exhausted from long days spent worrying about him and Mele while she hurled her hacking talents vainly against virtual walls that refused to offer any cracks, and hormones driving her body off-kilter. But Ninja had taken some deep breaths, willing herself into that creative fugue state where nothing existed but the challenge and the methods and the means. She’d never done drugs. She’d never needed them. There couldn’t be any better high than this.
The worm couldn’t be perfect, but it didn’t have to be. It just needed to be able to convince the enemy systems that any flaws in it were the result of flaws in the real world. Like a martial art, using the enemy’s strengths against it.
An alarm brought Ninja slowly back to awareness of the world about her. She felt sweat on her skin and heard the songs of native creatures that everyone called birds because that’s pretty much what they were. “Ninja here.”
“I know it hasn’t been quite two hours, but have you got it done?” the voice of Sergeant Giddings asked. “We can’t maintain this link for very long.”
“Yeah. Just finished. It won’t take long to send. I’ve compressed the worm along with the unpacking program,” Ninja said. “Sending.” The bright send status line scrolled from one side to the other, ending with a green “complete.” “Have you got it?”
“Hold on.” Giddings’s voice sounded hushed and hollow. Ninja could almost feel his surroundings in that voice, the dark and cramped hiding place that Mele’s group must be using at this moment. “Yeah. It’s clean. Any special instructions?”
“Just dump it into their systems. It’ll do the rest on its own.”
“Major Darcy says thanks and you’re a wonder.”
“Tell her I am a goddess,” Ninja said. “I produce miracles.”
“Major Darcy says she agrees.”
“Good. Also tell her not to get her fool self killed. You, too, Glitch. Stay safe. I’ve done all I can.”
The link ended, leaving Ninja to blink at the shadow patterns shifting on the top of the tent as leaves shivered in a slight wind. As if cued by her completion of her task, a hefty kick inside her caused her to wince. “Just wait a little longer,” she said. “Believe me, I’m not any happier about that than you are.”
“Mom?” Her daughter Dani looked in. “We good?”
“We’re good,” Ninja said.
“Will Aunt Mele be okay?”
“I hope so.”
“I want to be just like her someday.”
“Great. I’m going to do my best to talk you out of that. Can you bring me a candle?” There was one more thing she could do, and that was praying to her ancestors for any help they could give. Maybe, as some said, that wouldn’t help at all. But maybe it would. It certainly couldn’t hurt. And Mele and those with her doubtless needed all the help they could get, no matter the source.
* * *
• • •
“Freeze!”
Mele stopped all motion in response to the order called out by Sergeant Giddings.
Giddings advanced cautiously until he was even with Private Ford on point. “I’m getting readings on what looks like a sensor.”
“Does it see us?” Mele asked.
“No, Major. I’ve got it doing constant resets. But this type of sensor usually comes matched with at least one mine. You see anything, Ford?”
Private Ford leaned to the side, gazing down the wall with his head close to it, playing his light along the wall. Like the rest of the facility after so much fighting, this hallway lacked atmosphere. In the vacuum, without air to diffuse the illumination, the lights had sharp edges, showing only what they directly fell upon and leaving pitch black everywhere else. “There’s a bulge down there. Maybe a meter off? About waist height.”
“Yeah. I see it. They planted the mine on the wall and matched its cover to the wall real nice. Any more?”
“Not that I can tell.”
Giddings eased close to the enemy sensor, tapping into its controls. “Okay. It’s linked to the mine, and only one is showing up. They’re probably short on mines by now. I’m disabling the detonator on the mine, telling it to reset in ten minutes so it doesn’t tip off the enemy they’ve got a problem.”
One of the force recon soldiers spoke up. “Sergeant, check the ceiling.”
“The overhead?” Giddings looked up, as did Private Ford.
“Something there,” Ford said, pointing where his light had settled on a round object with a flat bottom. “The paint doesn’t quite match.”
“Sure as hell.” Giddings glanced back at the soldier. “Do you know what kind it is?”
“The ones we found had spider-silk trip wires with current running through them,” the soldier said. “Break ’em and the mine went off.”
Giddings played a light down the hallway, moving it slowly around. “There they are. See those?” he said as gossamer-thin threads shone in the light. “We can get by them by going low.”
Mele came forward far enough to see for herself. “Are you sure it’s safe to go through here?”
“It should be, Major. We’ll send Private Ford first, and if he gets through, the rest of us will follow.”
“What?” Ford said.
“You can see the mine there and the threads there,” Giddings said. “Go ahead. We’ll cover you and watch for any other danger.”
“But—”
“You’ve got a good instinct for this. I’m not worried.”
“Great,” Ford muttered. “You’re not worried.” He moved carefully, reaching the point where the spider threads glittered in Giddings’s light, dropping down then to slide forward until past them. Studying the hallway beyond, Private Ford took slow, cautious steps for another few meters before pausing and looking back.
“Hold on,” Mele said. “Glitch, can we use the link to this sensor to dump Ninja’s worm into the enemy systems?”
“Um . . . yes, Major. This is tied back to the enemy command center, so it should work fine for that. But if we upload the worm to them now, it gives them more chances to spot it and neutralize it before we reach the dock.”
“Ninja said it needed time to propagate through the enemy systems, though.” Mele looked ahead to where Private Ford waited. “What’s your recommendation, Glitch?”
He didn’t answer for a long moment, then nodded. “We should load it in here. That’ll give it time to spread through the enemy systems, and we don’t know if we’ll find another good load point between here and the dock. I think those two things outweigh the extra time it’ll give their system watchdogs to spot the worm.”
“Do it, then. Corporal Lamar, get the rest of our people past the mines, along with yourself. Sergeant Giddings and I’ll follow.”
“Yes, ma’am. Take it slow and easy, you apes. Mac, you go next with one of the ground apes, then I’ll bring the other three force recons through with me.”
“You guys look after the corporal, okay?” Mac told the soldiers. “She was at Kosatka, you know.”
“She’s safe with us, grunt,” one of the soldiers replied.
Mele kept switching her gaze between Sergeant Giddings as he uploaded the worm into the enemy systems and the Marines and soldiers creeping past the enemy mines. Not that she’d have time to do anything if either one screwed up, but it was what an officer did in cases like this. What was that quantum thing someone had told her about, where when particles were watched they behaved differently than when they weren’t being watched? Officer supervision of enlisted seemed to be based on the same concept. As long as you were watching, they’d somehow know, and things would turn out different.
“All done,” Giddings said. “I think it went in clean, Major.”
“All right. Go.”
“Wi
th all due respect, Major, you should not be rear guard.”
She hesitated. “You’re right. Follow me when it looks safe.”
Mele went perhaps faster than she should have, worried about the amount of time they’d spent in this hallway, but slowed as she passed under the spider-thread trip wires. Once on the other side, she used her light to illuminate the threads as Giddings came through the danger area.
“Up there,” Corporal Lamar told Private Ford, pointing to a vent cover.
He tilted his head back to look. “What idiot came up with this route?”
“The Major.”
“Oh. Uh. Okay.” Ford was hoisted up about a meter to reach the vent cover and hook it back. He peered inside. “This is gonna be a tight fit in battle armor.”
“It should take us undetected through an enemy threat area,” Mele said. “It should be about a hundred meters until we reach the right vent opening to exit the tube. Watch for any sensors planted near openings we pass.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Ford wriggled inside the circular vent, followed by two of the force recon soldiers. Lamar went next, then Mele, followed by Sergeant Giddings, the last two force recon, and in the rear Private MacKinder.
The inside of the tube was as tight as Ford had said. Normally a human wouldn’t have found it cramped at all, but in their battle armor the Marines and soldiers had a much tighter fit. They had to pull themselves along, pushing with their feet, trying not to create any more vibrations than necessary. Noise couldn’t travel in a vacuum, but the structure of the facility could carry tremors for a long distance.
One hundred meters wasn’t that far. An easy, quick walk. When crawling through a tight, dark tunnel, it was agonizingly long.
They finally made it to the vent opening they should exit through, dropping one by one into a compartment just large enough to hold everyone. “Rest here,” Mele said, sitting down carefully to avoid making any betraying thump.
For a few minutes no one said anything as they tried to catch their breath and recover their strength.
“Why do they call it that?” Private MacKinder muttered.
“Why do they call what what?” Private Ford replied.
“Inching. I was thinking, we had to inch our way through that pipe there, and then I thought, why do they call it inching?”
“Because that’s what it is.”
“That’s what what is?”
Sergeant Giddings interrupted the conversation. “Mac, you’ve got a dictionary in your armor systems. Everyone does. It doesn’t take up much space in the memory. Look up ‘inching.’”
“Okay, Sarge. Huh. It says an inch was an old system of measurement. There were twelve inches in a foot.”
“Twelve in a foot?” Private Ford asked. “Everybody’s feet are different sizes. How could you use that as a measurement?”
“I dunno. Hey, it says an inch equaled two point five four centimeters. That explains it.”
“It does?”
“Yeah,” MacKinder said. “You couldn’t say we were two point five four centimetering our way through there. That’d just sound stupid.”
“Yeah,” Ford agreed. “But if you inch your way along far enough, do you start footing your way along? Like if you—”
“Shut up,” Corporal Lamar said. “For the love of my ancestors, both of you shut up. Why out of all the Marines in this unit are you two among the survivors at this point?”
“Maybe we’re lucky,” Ford said.
“Or maybe I’m being punished for my sins,” Lamar replied.
“Corporal,” Mele said, “it sounds like everyone’s rested. Our time margin is shrinking. We’ve only got an hour left to cover the remaining distance. Let’s get moving.”
“Yes, Major. On your feet, boys and girls. Ford—”
“Yeah, I know,” Ford grumbled. “Take point. What’re you gonna do if I get shot?”
“I’m going to feel real bad for maybe one second, and then I’m going to put Mac on point.”
* * *
• • •
“There they go!”
Tired and half drowsing on the bridge of Saber as he waited for something to happen during the rough time frame that Vicki Shen had predicted, Rob Geary bolted to full alertness, gazing at his display where the vectors of the enemy warships were showing sudden, large changes. For days on end the enemy vectors had remained close to the same, maintaining their guard between Saber and the enemy freighter. But that was changing rapidly. “Give me an intercept vector. Bring the ship to full combat status. All weapons ready.”
The general quarters alarm resounded through the ship as a chorus of eager acknowledgments answered his orders. Ready markers for all departments glowed green almost immediately, showing they were prepared for combat. Rob wasn’t the only one aboard Saber who’d chafed at their enforced passivity.
“All weapons ready,” Ensign Reichert reported.
Rob checked the vectors of the four approaching destroyers, still coming in hot, but much too far distant to have any impact on this battle.
The freighter hadn’t moved and didn’t show any sign of preparing to move. “They kept the freighter and their ground forces in the dark,” Rob told his watch officers. “We would’ve seen preparations to leave, with ground forces going aboard along with their supplies.”
“Why wouldn’t they tell their own freighter?” Reichert asked.
“Because we would have seen those preparations and known the warships were getting ready to run. The commander on the light cruiser was willing to sacrifice the freighter and the ground forces he was supposed to be supporting to ensure we wouldn’t have any advance notice.”
“That didn’t work, did it?” Lieutenant Cameron said. “Intercept vector ready, Captain.”
Over the last several hours, Rob had shifted Saber’s orbit. While space itself had no up or down, whenever a ship was near a planet, “lower” always meant closer to the planet and “higher” meant being in an orbit farther from the world. Knowing that if the enemy warships fled they’d have to take a path through space toward the jump point for Scatha, Rob had positioned Saber higher than the orbiting facility and the enemy warships orbiting not too far from it, and in an orbital location that the enemy would have to pass not too far from when they ran. That pre-positioning meant that now the enemy light cruiser and destroyer couldn’t avoid an intercept by Saber as they tried to leave orbit on their way to a jump point out of this star system.
Rob ran his eyes over the intercept vector, seeing nothing that looked wrong. “Execute intercept vector maneuver.”
“Executing intercept maneuver,” Lieutenant Cameron echoed as he entered the command.
Saber rolled and pitched up under the push of her thrusters, followed by her main propulsion lighting off on full to accelerate her onto a path that would catch the enemy warships as they fled for the only jump point that they had a chance of reaching. Rob touched the general announcing circuit to speak to the crew. “All hands, this is the captain. We’re moving to engage. Our job is to slow down these two enemy ships so they can’t reach the jump point they’re aiming for before our friends can catch them. We need hits that damage propulsion and maneuvering. Do your best.”
Finally. Finally. After the long period of enforced waiting, there was a wild exhilaration to the charge into action. Rob’s fist clenched tightly as he saw the vectors steadying, Saber sweeping in fast to catch her prey.
Prey that still had deadly stings. But Saber could now concentrate on hitting the other warships since the Marines were going to handle the freighter, and if they failed, the remaining destroyers could easily overtake the slow freighter before it could escape. Even if Saber was knocked out, if she managed to slow the enemy warships in the process it would still be a win.
“Lieutenant Cameron, Ensign Reichert, I want an evasion maneuver that
gives us the best chance we can get to avoid their last missile while still managing an engagement with either enemy ship. Preferably the cruiser. We don’t want them getting away.”
“Yes, sir.”
Rob pulled on his survival suit, knowing that the odds of Saber getting holed were pretty bad.
“Got it, Captain,” Ensign Reichert said. “This should give us a roughly even chance of evading the missile, and then bring us close past the front of the light cruiser’s vector. Assuming he turns to engage us, that should give us a shot at his stern as we pass. Since they’ve just begun accelerating, like us, and we’re coming in from above and behind them, the relative speed during the engagement will be only about one hundred kilometers per second. We’re going to practically crawl past them, which should give us a decent chance of aimed shots.”
“Excellent,” Rob said.
“Captain,” Ensign Reichert added, “this intercept will also give them good opportunities to hit us in return. There’s no way to maximize our chances of a hit that doesn’t also give them good chances to hit us.”
“I understand. We’ll have to accept that risk. What counts is us being able to slow them down.” Rob approved the maneuver, trying to maintain the numb feeling that was holding back fear inside him. He’d done plenty of attack runs before, but when facing decent odds. This was the first time he was charging a ship straight in to catch the full force of a significantly stronger enemy formation, at a relative velocity so slow that a lot of hits could be expected on both sides.
“Fifteen minutes to intercept,” Lieutenant Cameron said.
Rob touched another control. “Lieutenant Commander Shen.”
She responded from her post in engineering. “Here, Captain.”
“If I’m killed or incapacitated, and Saber can still fight, do all you can to slow down those two enemy ships.”
Triumphant (Genesis Fleet, The) Page 27