“Laser attack, port side!” one of the sensor techs—Petty Officer Diaz—shouted in warning. Decisive shuddered under the strike, as alarms sounded throughout the bridge and the damage-control display suddenly blinked red. A laser didn’t deliver any kinetic energy to speak of and didn’t hammer a hull the way a K-cannon shot did, but a sufficiently powerful weapon could vaporize a bit of hull, and that small explosion could give a ship a kick, or a series of small kicks in the case of a pulsed weapon.
“Helm, roll the ship,” Girard ordered. “But make sure we’re bow-on to the plane of the ring ahead.”
“Aye, sir!” Chief Pilot Bell, the woman at the helm controls, answered. She expertly spun Decisive on her axis, rotating the area of hull under laser attack away from the point of contact to keep the weapon from burning through the spot where it had struck. A ragged, glowing scar of hot metal scribed its way around the hull as the ship turned away; the shuddering of hull alloy burning away into the void continued as the bridge displays rotated dizzyingly.
“What’s hitting us?” Sikander demanded.
“A powerful ground-based system from the fort around Jalid, sir,” Ensign Carter replied. “They burned out a lot of our hull cams on that side, but we’ve got imagery from just before it hit.”
“It looks like some kind of converted mining drill,” Amelia Fraser observed; she must have been studying the same imagery the sensor officer was looking at.
“We’re more than a million kilometers from that moon!” Jaime Herrera protested.
“It’s just a question of focus and power,” Amelia pointed out. “They’ve got a whole moon to dump thermal energy into, so they’re not worried about any kind of heat budget.”
“Mr. Girard, please remind the pirates that forts can’t dodge K-cannon fire,” Sikander told Girard.
“Main battery, engage the Jalid fort,” Michael Girard ordered. “General-purpose rounds—take out the laser battery!”
“Avoid hitting Jalid proper unless you see her attempt to get under way,” Sikander added. “We want to preserve any intelligence that might be down there.”
“Aye, sir—engaging the laser battery. Salvo port!” Herrera called out. An instant later, Decisive’s eight K-cannons whined shrilly as their powerful electromagnets hurled a flight of g-p projectiles—designed to squash against soft targets for maximum damage, as opposed to hardened armor-piercing projectiles designed to pierce tougher targets—against the distant station. The recoil jarred the bridge. “Sir, at this distance, we’ve got a nine-minute flight time. Should I keep firing, or see whether the first salvo is effective?”
“Let’s see what three salvos do,” Sikander decided. Nine minutes of continuous fire would drop something like fifty more salvos on the target, and he had to imagine there wouldn’t be much left of Jalid or the station built around the hulk if they kept throwing metal downrange during the first salvo’s flight. “But give them one load of armor-piercing shot to make sure we get that damned laser.”
“Ring impact in ten seconds!” Chief Bell called out in warning.
“Very well,” Sikander replied. He activated the ship’s general circuit. “All hands, brace for bow impact!”
Chief Bell turned Decisive at the last instant to point her bow directly ahead—and the destroyer plunged through the plane of the gas giant’s ring in the blink of an eye, exploding out of the haze of dust and ice crystals in a spectacular display. The impact jarred the ship as scores of tiny grains peppered the ship’s nose, but it was no worse than the shudder of the main battery firing. Sikander breathed a sigh of relief; the Admiralty was not very forgiving of captains who crippled their own ships through reckless maneuvers. “Well done, Chief,” he said. “Mr. Girard, resume our pursuit of Target Alpha, please.”
“Laser fire ceased, sir!” Ensign Carter reported.
“Our salvo’s still on the way,” Herrera said. “It wasn’t us, sir.”
Sikander had a guess, but he glanced at the aft-facing hull cams to make sure. “It’s the ring. It’s between us and the laser now—the dust and ice are attenuating the beam.” Of course, it wouldn’t be long before the laser’s crew realized the same thing, which meant they might decide to change targets in the eight-odd minutes they had left before Decisive’s salvo arrived. He signaled Giselle Dacey again: “Harrier, Decisive. Be advised there’s a powerful laser battery in that surface fortification. We’ve got a few salvos on the way, but be ready to take evasive action, over.”
“Decisive, Harrier, thank you for the warning. We saw them firing on you and sent them a salvo of our own. We’re now engaging Target Bravo, over.”
“Main battery, shift your fire to Target Alpha,” Girard ordered. “We’re getting close enough to try a long-range salvo or two.”
“Shifting fire, aye,” Herrera replied. Decisive’s turrets slewed to their new bearings with the hum of training motors. “Salvo starboard!”
Herrera’s first few salvos missed the fleeing pirate ship. The converted tug with its improvised armor was not a particularly agile target, but it was nimble enough to evade extreme long-range attacks. Its return fire was heavier than Sikander expected; at least one of its mismatched K-cannons was a cruiser-weight gun, significantly more powerful than anything Decisive carried. But the pirates lacked Aquilan fire control and experience in dealing with targets that could shoot back; Decisive jinked and twisted away from the incoming rounds, blasting away with her own kinetic cannons while dodging the pirate gunboat’s attacks. On Decisive’s fourth salvo, a single hit shattered one of the pirate’s clumsy armor panels and damaged the ship’s retracted warp ring. A moment later, the pirate altered course, bringing her full broadside into play.
“She’s turning to fight,” said Amelia over the command circuit.
“They’ve figured out they can’t get away,” Sikander replied. “Their mistake—a stand-up fight suits me well enough. Mr. Herrera, shoot out her weapons systems, if you please.”
“We’re on it, Captain,” the gunnery officer replied. “You might want to take a look behind us. Our salvos should be arriving at the fort any second now.”
“Thank you, Mr. Herrera.” Sikander shifted his attention to the moon nearly two million kilometers behind them. The planet’s rings no longer obscured his view—the pursuit of Target Alpha had carried Decisive above the thin bands of dust and ice. For a long moment, nothing happened. Then a ripple of powerful blasts racked the installation on the moon’s surface; the dome containing the converted mining laser disappeared in a bubble of molten metal, and moon ice vaporized instantly to a thin plasma of white-hot hydrogen and oxygen. A few seconds later, too soon for Decisive’s second salvo, another line of explosions walked across the pirate fort, blasting the surface structures into incandescent wreckage. Harrier’s fire, Sikander realized. And we’ve got two more salvos on the way to Fort Jalid. The pirates’ ground battery wouldn’t trouble Decisive or Harrier again.
He returned his attention to the engagement in front of him just in time to see Decisive’s main battery score two more hits on the armored pirate. One grazed the pirate’s forward turret, wrecking the stubby snout of the cannon mounted within; the second hit a little aft of the center of mass. “Target’s acceleration dropping, sir,” Carter called out. “Her power output just fell off, too. I think that last hit got one of her generators.”
“Very well. Mr. Girard, hold your fire for a moment and give me a comm channel to that ship.”
“Holding fire, aye, sir. You’re on.”
Sikander tapped his console. “This is the commanding officer of CSS Decisive, for the vessel twenty-five thousand kilometers ahead of me. Cease fire and heave to. We don’t want to kill you, but if you force us to keep firing we’re not going to be responsible for the consequences. Surrender, and you will receive a fair trial and the right to defend yourselves in court. If I have to give the order to resume fire, we’re going to put eight armor-piercing rounds through your center of mass and keep doing so
until you’re disabled or destroyed. So which is it going to be? Over.”
No one replied for a moment, but then the comm unit crackled, and a man replied in Jadeed-Arabi. “Decisive, this is Balina. Hold your fire. We surrender.”
“Balina, this is Decisive. Your surrender is accepted. Reduce your acceleration to zero, and train your remaining weapons directly away from us. We are coming alongside to board you, over.”
“We understand, Decisive. Balina, out.”
Sikander let out a sigh of relief. “Mr. Girard, bring us alongside. Mr. Herrera, keep your battery trained on Target Alpha. If you see one of those cannons moving back into a firing position, resume fire immediately. I wouldn’t put it past them to try something stupid when we approach.”
“Aye, Captain. We’ll keep her covered.”
It took almost half an hour—matching courses and speeds could be tedious even if both ships cooperated to meet in the middle, and Sikander frankly didn’t trust Balina’s ability to comply. While Decisive maneuvered to close the distance on the surrendered pirate vessel, Harrier successfully subdued Qarash with a few shots across the bow—apparently the pirates’ understanding with the Zerzuran fleet in Bursa did not quite extend to getting the impounded ship back with its weapons ready for use, and they hadn’t yet had the opportunity to rearm. “We’re heading back to the moon installation to see what’s left,” Giselle Dacey told Sikander when she reported Qarash’s capture. “I doubt the laser crew survived, but our prisoners say that there were a couple of hundred people living in Jalid and the structures nearby, and not all of them had time to get to one of the ships.”
Sikander checked his navigational plot. “We’ll be there just as soon as I take my prisoners aboard and send a prize crew over to Balina—call it an hour or so. Congratulations, Harrier. I would say we’ve done a good day’s work. Decisive, out.”
He ordered the ship’s security detachment—a force of twenty-five armed sailors under Zoe Worth’s command—over to Balina in the ship’s launch. Decisive’s K-cannons remained trained on the pirate vessel at a mere ten kilometers’ distance to protect the boat in transit. Then, when the sublieutenant sent back her prisoners, Sikander went down to the hangar bay to see his captives for himself. Darvesh joined him, silently handing Sikander a sidearm as they waited for the airlock to cycle. “A routine precaution, sir,” the tall Kashmiri explained. “They are criminals, after all.”
“Thank you, Darvesh.” Sikander had three masters-at-arms and a half-dozen armed crewhands around him already and didn’t imagine that anyone aboard the launch was in any position to storm Decisive’s hangar, but it was Darvesh’s job to prepare for the unlikely. If a little elementary caution reassured the valet, Sikander would allow him to have it. Amelia Fraser joined the group a few minutes later, and buckled on a sidearm of her own.
Decisive’s sailors herded twenty or so pirates out of the shuttle and arranged them in a ragged line along one bulkhead of the hangar before carrying out several more on stretchers. Sikander studied the group, taking their measure. Most were ordinary-looking spacers, men in rumpled shipboard jumpsuits with the typical grease stains and worn patches sailors tended to accumulate in their working clothes, and at a glance they reflected the general phenotype common throughout the Zerzuran worlds: a blending of Terran ethnicities not too different from what Sikander saw in the Aquilans around him, if perhaps a little shorter and stockier on average. Only a handful were women, but that didn’t surprise Sikander: Zerzura was Caliphate territory, after all, and cultural mores meant that relatively few women worked in space. Some glared at him angrily, but most stared at the deck or slumped in defeat.
They look so normal, Sikander realized. A thousand spaceports throughout the Coalition of Humanity were filled with millions of working spacers who looked just like these fellows. The prisoners he’d hauled in from Zafer had looked much the same. In fact … some of the prisoners were the same. He recognized one silver-haired fellow with a tattoo around his left eye, another one with thick arms and a heavy brow, a third man with a stork-like build who stood over two meters tall. “God is Truth! We caught some of these people in Zafer!”
“Apparently it wasn’t just Qarash that was released in Bursa,” Amelia said. “They must have let our prisoners go, too.”
“We’ll make sure they stay arrested this time,” Sikander promised. Clearly they couldn’t simply hand them back over to the naval authorities in Bursa … and he didn’t see any reason to think that things would work out any differently in another Zerzuran system, either. Neda, on the other hand, might be a different story. He studied the ragged group of outlaws, and stepped forward. “You, there. Which of you is the captain?”
The pirates exchanged looks, but said nothing. Sikander sighed. “Look, I want one of you to speak for how you’re treated and to answer for how you behave. I’ll pick someone at random if I have to, but the job belongs to whoever was in charge.”
One of the pirates—the older man with the silver hair—pointed over at the stretchers coming off the shuttle. “Al-Kobra. He’s over there.” The man he pointed out appeared to be unconscious, with a bandage around his head; Dr. Ruiz was already examining him.
“What happened to him?” Amelia asked the older pirate.
“There was a disagreement on the bridge,” another man answered. “Al-Kobra wanted to fight it out. Some of us didn’t think that was a very good idea.”
“Well, you were probably right about that,” Sikander said. Al-Kobra, really? His Jadeed-Arabi wasn’t great, but “the Cobra” sounded much like it did in Standard Anglic. He looked over to Amelia. “We’d better confine him separately. There might be some hard feelings over that, and I’d rather not have prisoners killing each other now that they’re in our hands.”
Amelia nodded. “I’ll see to it, Captain.”
“Good.” Sikander looked over the ragged group one more time, watching as Decisive’s masters-at-arms came forward to escort them to their temporary brig—ironically enough, the very same crew space where at least some of them had been confined before. “Let me know when we’ve got the Balina prisoners secured. We’ve got another pirate base to search, and I’m anxious to see what we find.”
15
Mersin, Dahar II
“Do you have any idea what this is all about?” Hanne Vogt demanded of Otto Bleindel as the flyer whisked them toward the pasha’s palace in Mersin. The early-morning sunshine painted the clouds that rolled up to the capital’s island hilltops a fiery gold hue, but the diplomat ignored the view. Hanne Vogt was not a morning person, and the fact that she’d been awakened before sunrise by a call from the pasha’s office did not put her in a particularly accommodating mood.
“Not really,” Bleindel admitted, scowling. He didn’t like to be caught off guard, especially in front of his nominal superior in the Empire’s special delegation to Zerzura. Unfortunately, a curtly worded summons for Hanne Vogt certainly suggested that Marid Pasha was unhappy about something. He didn’t think it had anything to do with the various clandestine activities his Security Bureau detachment had conducted in support of the Foreign Office’s mission. After all, if the pasha’s security forces had somehow figured out his part in the Meliya business or noticed his low-level collection efforts, they would have reacted in some way. “I’ve seen no sign that the Zerzurans are onto any of our operations, if that’s what you’re worried about. Whatever’s going on today, it doesn’t have anything to do with us.”
“It’s got something to do with us, since we’re being called into the principal’s office.” Vogt crossed her legs and leveled a cold, thoughtful look at Bleindel. “Are you sure you haven’t forgotten to inform me about an operation?”
Because he actually had a high regard for her competence and liked her better than most Foreign Office careerists he worked with, he told her the truth: “Hanne, there are many things that I don’t inform you about. They’re not relevant to the Foreign Office’s mission to Zerzura, and
the first step in preserving secrecy is not discussing things with people who don’t strictly need to know. What I will tell you is that the reaction of the pasha’s government is all wrong if you suspect that he’s discovered some operation of ours that he objects to. If we were engaged in some hypothetical action carrying a risk of discovery—not that I am admitting that we are, mind you—and if the pasha had somehow learned of it, then the last thing he’d do is call us in to challenge us about it while allowing it to continue. Either he’d shut it down and scoop up all of our people he could catch, or he’d say nothing at all and initiate a counterintelligence operation. If you don’t believe me when I tell you I don’t think Marid Pasha is concerned about KBS activities, the pasha’s summons should make it clear enough.”
Vogt’s eyes flashed dangerously—she was not accustomed to being explained to. “Fine, then. But you’d better remember that when it comes to things that might make my job here more difficult—say, a KBS operation that might leave the pasha furious at us if we somehow fuck it up—I define ‘need to know’ very broadly. And I am the head of the Imperial mission here.”
“That’s why I consulted with you about the Meliya operation. Which, I will point out, achieved exactly the results we hoped for.” After sitting on Hanne Vogt’s proposal of military aid for almost two months, Marid Pasha had suddenly warmed up to the idea when the Velar Electorate had announced the redeployment of a battle squadron to its Zerzuran border. He’d signed the deal within a week of Vashaoth Teh’s destruction.
“At five times the body count you estimated.”
“I regret that, but it was important to make it look like the work of a terrorist group.” There wasn’t much more Bleindel could say; if he defended the number of casualties at Meliya Station as unexpected he would look incompetent, and if he played it off as unimportant he would look like a psychopath. He knew himself well enough to know that at some basic level he was able to dissociate himself from the consequences of his work … a trait that came in handy in his profession but provoked quite a bit of alarm in less pragmatic people if he let them catch a glimpse of it. Frankly, he would have preferred a smaller, more surgical operation too, but Aquila’s unexpectedly determined efforts to win over Marid Pasha had forced him to put together the Meliyan operation in a hurry, and the basic premise of the thing—an audacious “terrorist” attack—had required a certain carelessness about collateral damage. In the end, he believed that a strong and secure Dremark was a force for stability in human space, and empires didn’t grow strong or remain strong without people like him, people who could make difficult choices. Most of the time, Hanne Vogt recognized that his sort of work had a place in Imperial affairs; not all Foreign Office types did.
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