Scornful Stars

by Richard Baker

  No one had noticed Bleindel slipping to the side as he entered the bridge. He raised his autorifle and fixed the sights on the center of North’s chest. One small part of him hesitated, wondering if the commanding officer of Decisive might be more useful as a hostage than a corpse … but Gadira was a blot on Bleindel’s career that had followed him for years, and Sikander North was the single individual on whom he could blame that failure. He pulled the trigger—

  —just as North’s Kashmiri bodyguard hurled himself into the line of fire. “Nawabzada, look out!” Darvesh Reza shouted. The burst intended for Decisive’s captain stitched a lethal line across the tall Kashmiri’s chest. He stumbled back into North and fell, taking them both to the deck.

  “Damn!” Bleindel swore savagely and aimed another burst at the two men tangled on the deck, but he’d lost his shot—they were both behind the tactical display now, although his burst might have caught them on the ricochet. He started to move into a better position to clear his line of fire, only to find a storm of mag darts descending on his position from the other Aquilans on Meduse’s bridge. Rounds shrieked and sparked all around him, tearing up the row of acceleration couches he’d been using as cover.

  Not optimal, he realized. I’m the only Dremish target still standing in the room. The sailors who’d made it through the smoke and the bridge hatch were all on the deck, or had been driven back into the passage outside.

  “Right side of the bridge hatch!” Sikander North shouted. “He’s back by the communications console!”

  The KBS agent ducked back behind the best cover he could find, looking for his next move … and then he found it. One of the escape scuttles Sommer had mentioned was on the deck just two meters from where he sheltered. He briefly considered holding his position and calling Sommer to make another attempt at the bridge hatch now that they’d gotten a foothold inside the compartment, but in a matter of moments one of the other Aquilans would find a clear shot on him, and that would be the end of that. He was not afraid to take a gamble if there was a hope of success, but staying where he was meant certain death, and would not make any difference in the effort to retake Meduse.

  If we can’t take the bridge, we might succeed elsewhere, he decided. He dropped a smoke grenade just in front of his own position, waited a moment for the smoke to thicken, and then crawled toward the hatch in the deck. He yanked it open and dove in headfirst as darts scoured the spot where he’d just been standing.

  22

  Meduse, Dahar Naval Shipyard

  I am sorry, Darvesh. Sikander knelt on the blood-pooled deck beside Darvesh Reza, holding one lifeless hand in both of his. The bodyguard had died almost instantly, shot through the heart in the moment he interposed himself in the line of fire. He lay on his back with his eyes closed, a curious small smile fixed on his face. The rifle burst that had killed him had left his face unmarked; Sikander was strangely grateful for that. This is my fault, he silently told his fallen servant, mentor, confidant … friend. You told me to leave this to someone else. I chose not to listen, so you had to come with me. And because I insisted on doing what I thought was my job, you had to do yours—just as you said you would.

  “Captain? Are you hurt, sir?” Comm Tech First Class Jackson sank down on one knee beside Sikander, looking at him with concern. “Sir, should I call for a corpsman?”

  Sikander took a deep breath, and looked down at himself. He bled freely from a gash on his lower leg—a graze or ricochet from a mag dart, he guessed, although he hadn’t even noticed the injury when he’d received it—but otherwise he seemed unhurt. “I’m fine,” he made himself answer. “Chief Reza took the burst that was meant for me.”

  Jackson grimaced. “I’m sorry, sir. I know he’s served with you for a long time. But I’m afraid there isn’t much we can do for him now.”

  “No, there isn’t.” Sikander set Darvesh’s hands across his chest, and stood. Darvesh is dead, he realized dully. He warned me, and I didn’t listen. Dear God, what now? For a long moment the only thing he could do was to stare at Darvesh’s face, replaying their argument in the hangar bay. There had to be a way to change this outcome, to go back and make the right decision instead of the wrong one, and then maybe events wouldn’t lead to this inescapable conclusion. Nothing else seemed to matter at the moment other than figuring out how he could have avoided this … but then Sikander realized that he couldn’t hear any weapons fire close by. The surviving sailors on the smoky bridge watched him in silence, waiting for their orders.

  It’s too much, he told himself. I can’t figure this out now. Darvesh needed a better answer than he could manage at the moment, so Sikander made himself set aside his confusion, resolving to come back and work out the meaning of what had just happened as soon as he could. He turned away from his fallen friend and looked at Petty Officer Jackson. “What’s our status? How many casualties?”

  “Besides the chief, we lost Diaz and Waters,” Jackson said. “Birk is wounded in the arm, but he’s still on his feet. The Dremish backed down the passageway and around the corner.” The comm technician shook his head. “They must’ve lost ten people trying to rush the bridge.”

  Sikander looked back at the compartment’s entrance; five Dremish sailors lay dead or unconscious in the doorway or just inside the bridge, and he knew more were in the passageway outside. They wore ordinary working uniforms, not battle dress. Ship’s company pressed into service as a landing force, he realized. Many of his own sailors were not much better prepared for a boarding action, but at least they’d had time to suit up with light armor and practice with their weapons before he’d launched his operation. Then he noticed that no Dremish bodies lay near the communications stations at the aft end of the bridge.

  “Bleindel!” he snarled. He’d spotted the Dremish agent just in time to see him raise his autorifle. In one terrible instant he’d recognized his old adversary and realized that Bleindel had him in his sights, until Darvesh had stepped in between them. He hurried over to where the Bleindel had been hiding … and spotted the open scuttle in the deck. A small splatter of blood smeared the edge of the scuttle hatch. Damn him! He got away again!

  He glared at the hatch, resisting the urge to rush off in pursuit—for all he knew Otto Bleindel could be waiting in the compartment below with his rifle aimed at the ladder to gun down the first person to follow him. Besides, Sikander had other things to worry about first. He backed away a step or two, and tapped his comm unit. “Mr. Hollister, the Dremish managed to get an armed force on board,” he told the sublieutenant. “They are almost certainly heading your way.”

  Hollister took a long time to respond. “They’re already here, Captain,” he finally answered. His words came in a halting monotone. “We just repelled a group that tried to storm main control, and I think there may be some more out in the engine rooms. We’re trying to ascertain whether the engineering plant is secure.”

  “Keep at least some of your people at work on warming up the power plant. I want to get under way as soon as possible—the longer we stay in this docking cradle, the more likely it is we’ll have to fight off additional efforts to retake the ship.”

  “We’ll do our best, sir. But we lost some people and I’ve got to post guards in case the Dremish make another try for the control room.”

  “Acknowledged. Carry on, Mr. Hollister.” Sikander switched back to the command channel. “Mr. Girard, Mr. Shah, Meduse has been boarded by a number of armed sailors—Dremish from Neu Kiel, I think. If they’re trying to retake this ship, there may be Dremish forces moving on your positions as well. Be on your guard.”

  “This is Lieutenant Girard. Captain, a party of Dremish sailors just boarded Drachen through the torpedo loading hatch. We’ve got serious fighting in the passageways near the torpedo room.”

  “Lieutenant Shah on Zyklop, sir. We also are under attack. Ms. Worth was forced to abandon the bridge, but we managed to keep the boarders out of engineering.”

  “Boarding parties,
this is Decisive,” Amelia Fraser said. “Do you need reinforcements?”

  Sikander answered at once. “Belay that, XO. You don’t have any more people to send over. The ship is already dangerously undermanned, and we handed out just about every weapon in the small-arms locker. Do not, repeat, do not attempt to send any more of the crew over to the shipyard. If we lose control of one of these ships, we’ll evacuate our force to the other cruisers and disable the target we abandon with main battery fire, over.”

  Amelia hesitated just a moment before responding. “Aye, Captain. We’ll continue to monitor the situation. Just so you know, we fired warning shots at Penguen and Marti—they’re holding position a thousand kilometers away. Rahman’s orbit has carried her out of firing position. She won’t be back around again until early tomorrow morning, but there’s always a chance the Zerzurans get her under way too. I would advise being on our way before they do. Decisive, out.”

  We’re trying to do too much with not enough, Sikander told himself. Amelia Fraser and Michael Girard had said as much during the mission planning, arguing that it would be safer and more certain to destroy the cruisers in place. Decisive’s K-cannons might not have had the punch to get through the cruiser’s heaviest armor, but they certainly could have wrecked the warp rings and drive plates to immobilize the pasha’s new squadron for months and months of repairs, and a warp torpedo with a zero-range detonation would have ensured that the pasha’s cruisers never left their docking cradles again. On the other hand, killing hundreds of workers with a bombardment of the shipyard wasn’t something that Sikander was prepared to live with, and Eric Darrow had strongly favored the idea of removing and interning the ships instead of destroying them. The special commissioner thought that temporarily confiscating ships was much less likely to be seen as an act of war than firing on them, and Sikander believed—or hoped, more accurately—that he was right.

  He turned his attention to conditions on the bridge: Two of his enlisted hands stood guard by the bridge hatch, while the surviving technicians worked to activate the ship’s control consoles. Electronics Tech Tolbin brought the main bridge display online even as he watched; the deck-to-overhead vid displays that ringed the compartment flickered to life, although some of the panels were shorted out by mag-dart damage and only the most elementary target data populated the screen. Decisive stood only twenty kilometers off, slowly orbiting the shipyard as she warily kept an eye on the Zerzuran gunboats in the distance.

  It’s good to be able to see what’s going on outside, Sikander decided, but it’s not what I need to know right at this moment. “Good work, Petty Officer Tolbin. Before you move on to more sensor systems, see if you can find the ship’s internal security monitors and get them working. We need to see where the Dremish inside the ship are.”

  “Aye, sir,” Tolbin replied. “Umm, it might take a minute. I’m not exactly sure what I’m looking for. Waters was our expert on security systems.”

  “Do your best,” Sikander told him. He moved over to check on Birk, who was working on the helmsman’s console. “Quartermaster, how are you coming along here?”

  “Good, Captain,” the petty officer replied. Much of his left arm was encased in a battle dressing, but he seemed to be alert and in good spirits. “We’re still booting up the nav systems, but basic helm functions are ready. We can move whenever the engineering team brings the engines online.”

  “I understand. Thank you, Birk.” He changed his comm channel again. “Mr. Hollister, your status?”

  “Sir, the engineering spaces are secure, and we’re bringing the generators up to full power. You should have engines in five minutes.”

  “That was fast. You did a complete sweep of the engineering spaces?”

  “Not exactly, sir. We got the damage-control sensor system working, and we’re using it to check which compartments are occupied.”

  “Clever thinking, Mr. Hollister,” Sikander said. Damage-control systems included a sensor for each and every compartment of the ship to detect hazards such as vacuum, fire, radiation, or loss of power … as well as whether or not a particular compartment was occupied. He knew where all his people were supposed to be—and Reed Hollister had now figured out a way to determine which of Meduse’s hundreds of compartments harbored people he couldn’t account for. “Brilliant, in fact. Call your counterparts on Drachen and Zyklop and tell them what you’ve done, and then get over to the damage-control display. You’re going to locate our Dremish holdouts and direct our search teams to the compartments where they’re hiding.”

  “Aye, sir. I’m on it.”

  What am I missing? Sikander asked himself. He turned to look for Darvesh to ask the Kashmiri veteran’s advice, as he’d done a hundred times over the last twenty years … and realized again that Darvesh Reza would not be able to help him now. He stared for a long moment at his friend and protector, lying still on the cold steel deck with his hands folded over his chest. Darvesh would remind me that we have less than thirty people on this ship and can’t reinforce our numbers, but more enemies might arrive at any time. Sooner or later they’ll find another way in—the longer we remain in this docking cradle, the greater the danger. Well, he might be able to do something about that.

  He keyed the general boarding team channel again. “Attention, all boarding detachments. This is the captain. Jettison your accommodation tubes, release your mooring clamps, and use your attitude thrusters to get clear of the shipyard. Break things if you have to—if we remain tethered to the station, the Dremish and the Zerzurans will retake these ships.”

  Amar Shah replied on a private channel. “Captain, that will leave us adrift until we can start up the engines. And it will trap any remaining Dremish sailors on board with us.”

  “They had their chance to leave,” Sikander told him—he’d instructed his boarding detachments to keep their prizes in the docking cradles as long as possible for that very reason, but now it was clearly too dangerous to linger. “We can put them off in lifeboats later if we need to. Detach from the station, Mr. Shah.”

  “Aye, sir,” Shah answered. “We are jettisoning our tubes now.”

  Sikander turned his attention back to Meduse’s bridge. Distant clatters and thumps echoed throughout the ship as one by one the ship’s accommodation tubes, the extensible passageways that linked her airlocks to the airlocks of the shipyard’s docking cradles, decoupled. He hoped that no one was in them at the time; he was pretty sure that no Aquilans were on the wrong side of the airlocks, but if the Dremish or Zerzurans had teams preparing to assault through any of the tubes they wouldn’t have had much warning before the seals were broken. A moment later, the cruiser rocked softly as Quartermaster Birk hit the attitude thrusters, releasing puffs of compressed gas to impart a gentle drift away from the station—the thrusters used nonpowered systems to ensure that a ship didn’t lose all maneuvering capability in the event of a power failure. Drachen likewise detached; Zyklop followed suit a moment later.

  “We’re clear, Captain,” Birk reported. “Still waiting on engine power, though.”

  “Very well. Petty Officer Jackson, Deckhand White, Deckhand Flores, you’re with me. Everybody else, stay here and keep the compartment buttoned up—the Dremish may make another attempt to storm the bridge.”

  Petty Officer Tolbin frowned. He was the senior man left on the bridge. “Where are you going, Captain?”

  Sikander picked up Darvesh’s battle rifle and checked the clip. “I’m going to hunt down that murderous bastard Bleindel before he finds a way to kill us all,” he said.

  * * *

  They started by clearing the compartment immediately below the bridge, even though Hollister reported that the internal sensors showed no body heat or movement. It turned out to be an equipment room housing the ship’s inertial navigation system—something that could easily have been sabotaged to impede the Aquilans’ ability to track the ship’s course. Other than another splatter of blood at the bottom of the ladder leading to
the bridge, they found no sign of Bleindel or any indication that he’d made any attempt to damage the delicate systems. Sikander guessed that Bleindel simply hadn’t realized that the gyroscopes and tracking computers might be important; after all, the man was an intelligence operative, not a naval professional.

  “He’s bleeding, anyway,” Petty Officer Jackson observed. “Someone must have winged him during the shootout on the bridge.”

  Where would he go? Sikander had to imagine that Bleindel would try to circle back to rejoin any Dremish assault groups he could find, which probably meant returning to the passageway just outside the bridge. But now they were a deck below that passage, and he might not know the quickest way back to that point. The blood on the deck plates led to the equipment room’s door … and there Sikander found the discarded wrapper of a battle dressing. “Damn the luck. A blood trail would have made tracking him down a lot easier,” he said. “Mr. Hollister, where are the Dremish?”

  “There are a few outside the bridge, sir, but the biggest group now appears to be down on the mess deck—it’s a central location where several main passages converge. I can see more near the port-side airlock where we docked the orbiter, too. Petty Officer Kersey reported that she had to seal the hatch a few minutes ago, but I haven’t heard anything from her since.”

  “Which way, sir?” Jackson asked him.

  Sikander doubted that Bleindel would return to the same spot where an assault had just failed—either he’d go for reinforcements, or he’d give up and attempt to escape. If not the bridge, then is it the orbiter or the mess deck? he wondered. Of those two possibilities, collecting reinforcements for another attack somewhere else presented the more dangerous threat. “The mess deck,” Sikander decided. “Mr. Hollister, guide us, if you please.”

  “Turn left when you exit the hatch and head aft about ten meters. Go right at the T, and you’ll find one of the main ladderways in another fifteen meters or so. You’ll descend one deck and head aft.”