And I realized something, something important.
On the other side of her, right next to the cutting board, was a jar of the same seasoning.
She hadn’t needed to reach across me.
She was trying to tell me something.
“Uh,” I turned toward her. My throat was dry so I took a quick gulp of water. My scalp was tight and my hair felt like it was standing on end and a little voice in the back of my mind was shouting stupid stupid STUPID at me. It is always good advice to listen to the wise little voice in your head, the one that urges you not to ask someone to hold your beer while you do some idiotic thing. You know what? I was damned sick of listening to that voice. I was sick of a lot of things, like being responsible for the survival of my entire species, while the governments back home second-guessed my every decision. Most especially I was sick and tired of having to be a lonely freakin’ monk just because I was the commander. I am human too, and it is hard to work up enthusiasm for saving everyone’s lives when mine is so achingly lonely.
So, fuck that little voice, I decided. Sometimes, the purpose of life is to enjoy living. Damn it, even if we succeeded in stopping the Maxolhx from reaching Earth, we still couldn’t go home until the Maxolhx lifted their blockade of Gateway. Why the hell should I care about some Army regulation that was written a long time ago, on a planet far, far away? I committed mutiny and stole a freakin’ starship, so it’s not like me breaking regulations was anything new. A hypothetical punishment, from a government on a world that soon might not exist, was not an effective deterrent.
She set down the knife and looked at me. Looked at me. Just looked into my eyes, and waited for me to say whatever I was going to say. What was I going to say? I know what I wanted to say. “Marga-”
“Heeeey, Joe,” Skippy interrupted us, startling me. “How about-”
“Skippy,” I didn’t look up at the speaker. “Unless the ship is on fire, and I can do something about it. Go. Away.”
“But-”
“Go away. Now. Right now,” I barked at him.
“Shutting up,” he pouted, as the sound of his words were drowned out by the laughter of a group coming into the galley.
Note to self: install a locking door on the damned galley.
Margaret turned away, clearing her throat. She looked up at the people coming into the galley who had obvious just come from an exercise. We would see the telltale red mark of a powered-armor suit helmet liner on their foreheads.
The next hour was agonizingly awkward. While we finished baking the burger buns for lunch and got preparations completed for dinner, there was a steady stream of people in the galley, laughing and joking and debriefing about the training exercise. I envied their happiness and easy fellowship, and hated them for being there. Adams left first, she had to lead a Spin class in the gym. I put things away, cleaned up and checked the time. Lunch began in three hours. Normally, I would have gone to the gym, but that was the last place I wanted to be right then.
Instead, I stomped into my office, slammed myself down into the chair and jabbed the button to slide the door closed. “Skippy!” I bellowed. “What was that?”
“What was what?” His fake innocence did not fool me.
“You know exactly what you did. You blocked me!”
“Blocked you?”
“Don’t play dumb with me. You broke the Bro Code.”
“Well, I-”
“That hurt, Skippy.” My eyes were watering and I wiped them with the back of my sleeves, not caring if he saw.
“Dude,” he sounded just as hurt. “I did it for you. You asked me to do that.”
“I did? When? What the hell?”
“It was the night you got hammered in Bangor, before the Delta team tried to seize the Dutchman. When you got to the hotel after midnight, you were babbling, and you made me promise that if I ever saw you doing something stupid that might hurt Margaret, I was to stop you. That’s what I did.”
“Holy-” I had no memory of that, but I didn’t think he was lying.
“I didn’t want to do it. Really, the last thing I want is to get involved in squishy stuff like relationships between you monkeys. Um, I mean, humans. Sorry about that. I didn’t do the right thing?”
“Shit. We’ll never know now. Ah, damn it, it’s not your fault.”
“Joe, despite all that empathy crap you made me learn about, I know almost nothing about how to handle relationships. However, your primary concern was to avoid doing anything that might hurt Margaret.”
“You are right, my man,” I offered him a fist bump, and he returned it. “If it’s meant to happen, it’ll happen, I guess. Crap. It’s not supposed to happen, and she knows it. My life sucks.”
“Hey. My best friend,” he made a show of wiping his fist on his admiral’s uniform, “is a filthy monkey. My life sucks too.”
Margaret Adams was not focused on the Spin class, losing track of where she was in the program. A slow song started when she had the group still standing on the pedals, grinding hard up a hill. At one point, she got off her bike to fumble with the music player, and shuffled through songs while the group waited.
After the class, Captain Frey lingered behind to help Adams wipe down the bikes and adjust anything that had come loose. “Something bothering you, eh?”
“I’m fine,” Adams replied, with a distinct I-don’t-want-to-talk-about-it vibe. That was unfair of her and she knew it. She had been paired with Frey in many training exercises, and they always had each other’s backs.
Frey lowered her voice. “Trouble with a guy?” She asked knowingly.
“Don’t want to talk about it. Ma’am,” Adams flung a towel over one shoulder and strode straight through the gym and out the door.
“Uh huh,” Frey muttered to herself. “Guy trouble for sure.”
The Oklahoma fried onion burgers were a big hit with the crew, except for the few uncultured cretins who hate onions. The only problem with that meal was Skippy interrupting to sing ‘Oooooooklahoma, where the wind-’
I won’t finish the song, it was painful enough to hear it the first time. It was my fault for not forbidding Skippy to sing, I should have known. A couple missions ago, someone made New York-style cheesecake, and the beer can serenaded us with Sinatra’s ‘New York New York’, then ‘New York Groove’ by one of the guys in the band Kiss, then U2’s song ‘New York’, then-
You get the idea. There are a LOT of songs about New York.
We never made cheesecake again.
CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT
We got the almost-upgraded Flying Dutchman, and the not-quite-yet-bad-ass Valkyrie, flying in formation at the edge of a red dwarf star system. If you are wondering why we are always visiting red dwarf systems, that’s because those stars are the most common in the galaxy. They are also mostly unable to support complex lifeforms, at least the type of life that is able to travel between stars. That made them useful for our purposes, because we wanted to avoid star systems with large populations and therefore substantial networks of strategic defenses.
Skippy had recommended this star because he thought we could find power boosters there, and because it was a relatively soft target. It was in a gap between the Sagittarius and Perseus Arms, about a quarter of the way around the galaxy from Earth. When we came through the closest wormhole, we were as far from home as we had ever been, except for our two trips out to the beta site.
This star, which even the Maxolhx had not bothered to give a name, had one feature that attracted us: a gas giant planet with a refueling base. That fuel station also supported arriving ships with stores of supplies, and an automated fabrication shop that could manufacture equipment larger and more complex than the shop aboard most ships could handle.
The orbiting base had defenses to protect itself, and I was worried about that, despite Skippy’s assurances that the Valkyrie could handle anything the base threw at us until we were able to knock out their weapons. A supply base that saw a lot of traffic wou
ld not be a soft target, but this place was, because of its history. It had been built over a sixty thousand years ago, to support Maxolhx ships patrolling two strategically-vital wormhole clusters. If the Rindhalu launched a surprise attack, those wormhole clusters would be an important route that led deeper into the heart of the Maxolhx Hegemony, their inner circle of homeworlds.
The base we chose as a target used to be important, until several wormhole shifts had left it in the middle of nowhere. One of the nearby wormhole clusters had gone dormant, the other now connected in the opposite direction from the Hegemony, to nothing important. Rather than being on the frontline, the base had been downgraded so it was kind of a Coast Guard search and rescue station. According to the skimpy data Skippy had gathered, the base serviced only two or three ships per year, and one of those ships was a cargo carrier that supplied similar stations. There had been talk of shutting the place down, or at least mothballing it until a future wormhole shift made it important again, but bureaucratic inertia kept it limping along. All we cared about was that supply bases kept stores of important components like VPM power boosters. Any boosters the station had were very likely old, perhaps even obsolete, but Skippy did not care. As long as the power boosters were not actually broken, he could make them work, better than new. All he needed us to do was to capture enough to enhance the capabilities of both ships in our little fleet.
We had a lot working in our favor. The station was fully automated, so we didn’t need to worry about armed opposition of the biological kind. It was unlikely any ships would be there, and we could perform a recon at long range to confirm that. And we had an outstanding tactical plan, developed by Smythe and his team. I would be aboard Valkyrie, with the Dutchman being commanded by Reed. She wanted to fly a dropship, but so did Desai. Because Desai might soon be stuck shuttling people from either Paradise or Earth to the beta site, I felt I owed her an opportunity to actually fly something again. Besides, it would be good for Reed to gain experience as a starship captain. I told her that cute guys would be very impressed with our very own Captain Janeway.
She was not amused.
The operation began in textbook fashion. Together, we jumped into the system, about a lighthour away from the orbiting supply base. Skippy confirmed everything was exactly as he expected. Well, not exactly, but close enough. There were no starships docked at the station, it was orbiting within the zone he predicted, and the fuel tanks appeared to be full. That meant no ship had been there to refuel recently, because the fuel-extraction drogue that dipped down into atmosphere was not operating. The tanks must have been topped off at least nine days ago, by Skippy’s estimate, probably more.
We updated our navigation system with the station’s coordinates, Smythe assured me his team was ready to go, and I gave the ‘Go’ order. Holy shit, I thought to myself, this is it. We are actually attacking, like conducting a boarding operation, against an apex-species facility. Sure, we had boarded the ship that was now our Valkyrie, but Skippy had neatly sliced that ship apart before our boarding team set their boots on the hull. We could not use any fancy wormhole physics against this target. It would be, as Smythe described it, a simple smash-and-grab operation, with equal parts smashing and grabbing. I was Ok with whatever smashing he did, as long as the grabbing part was successful.
The Dutchman jumped in first, leading by just over one second. She emerged one point five lightseconds from the station, immediately began to saturate the area with a damping field, and fired her maser cannon at pre-selected targets on the station’s hull. Before the first maser beam struck the station, Valkyie jumped in less than five kilometers from the station, on the other side. We cut loose with masers and particle beams, knocking out defense shield generators as our first priority.
The fight pitted a weakened battlecruiser and a star carrier, against an elderly and automated supply station. Still, it was a furious battle while it lasted, which was about eleven seconds. Usually, everything happens really slooooowly in space warfare, because the distances are so great. Even a bolt of focused light crawls along at a mere hundred and eighty six thousand miles per second. But, when the combatants are at close range, things happen fast.
The Valkyrie rotated around its long axis, spinning to keep the shields on one side from being pounded so badly they failed. Though our new ship was a battlecruiser, it could not supply sufficient power to the shields and weapons at the same time, and we needed priority to weapons. The key to the battle was to knock out the enemy’s shields in one particular area, so we could have a clean shot at the juicy center under the crunchy shell.
While we were hammering away at the station, it was shooting back. Within three seconds, space between Valkyrie and the station was no longer a vacuum. It was filled with missiles exploded by our point-defense systems, debris from railgun rounds of both sides that had been turned to particles when they impacted energy shields, scattered particle beams, and finally by plating blown off the station’s hull when our precision directed-energy weapons burned through the enemy shields.
Degrading shields in a particular area of the station was the key to our entire assault plan. That took seven seconds, during which my heart was racing because I felt our mighty Valkyrie shudder from multiple impacts. On the big display, our shields were glowing either yellow or orange, colors chosen for what they meant to the humans who now owned the ship. It was a race against time, because once the stored energy in Valkyrie’s shield generators was exhausted, we had to stop firing weapons so the reactors could shift their power output to recharge the shields.
We won the race, with a comfortable three seconds left on the clock.
With enemy shields down, we shifted our energy weapons to attack defensive cannons, while we launched missiles. Three missiles, then another pair. The station immediately destroyed four of them.
The last one got through, its armored nosecone punching through the skin of the station like it was tissue paper. Skippy actually had to remind the missile’s tiny brain to explode the warhead before it plunged completely through the station and out the other side. The missile complied.
Eleven seconds after Valkyrie jumped in, the fight was over. Or, the ship-to-station part of the fight was over. Our missile had taken out the station’s AI and cut off the stores section from the main power supply. The station was defenseless, and we hoped it would be, long enough for Smythe’s people to get aboard and allow Skippy to take over local systems.
“Skippy?” I asked anxiously. The amount of damage that Valkyrie had taken in the brief battle shocked me. Our mighty warship needed those damned power boosters, or we would be a sitting duck in a real battle.
“Give me a minute, I’m directing the defense cannons to knock debris out of the way. If a dropship smacks into a chunk of-”
“Yeah, I hear you. Smythe, standby one.”
He didn’t reply, he didn’t need to.
“Ok, we’re good,” Skippy declared with relief. “We have a clear flightpath to the target.”
“Away boarders,” I ordered, and four Panthers rocketed away from Valkyrie, curving around to converge on two of the station’s docking bays. The big doors there were closed and slicing them open with the ship’s cannons would create too much hazardous debris, so the Panthers needed to set down next to the doors and Smythe’s people would blow the personnel airlocks with explosive charges.
“Reed?” I called her, mostly because I was nervous and had nothing else to do at the moment. “How you doing over there, Fireball?”
“Nominal,” she replied tersely from the command chair aboard the Flying Dutchman.
That was my cue to shut up.
Our textbook operation went to hell, as soon as the first boarding team blew the inner airlock door and flung themselves down the corridor beyond, pushing off the walls in the zero gravity. A grenade or maybe a rocket exploded, ripping into the two operators in the lead and ripping into the pair behind them. On Valkyrie’s bridge, all I could do was watch, sickened a
s two, then four lifesigns monitors flatlined. We had lost four people just like that. “Skippy!” I shouted frantically. “How did the station-”
“That wasn’t the station! It wasn’t an automated defense system!” He was a frantic as I was. “I think- Yes! There are two Maxolhx over there. No, three of them!”
“How did you not know they were there?” I demanded. “Smythe, pull your people out-”
“Sir,” he protested in a voice a lot more calm that I would have been. “We might not get another shot at this. Skippy, the oppo is limited to three? You are certain of that?”
“Yes, three. Only three.” Skippy insisted. “They must have engaged their suit stealthware before we killed the station AI. I couldn’t detect them until they started moving.”
“Stealthware?” I screeched unhelpfully. All I was doing was making the situation worse. “How can you be sure?”
“Joe, you have to trust me on this. Now I know to look for the signature where their stealthware interacts with-”
“I trust you,” I cut him off. “Smythe, we are not sending more people in Kristang hardshell armor, against three Maxolhx equipped with-”
“Joe!” It was Skippy’s turn to interrupt. “The enemy are not wearing combat suits. They only have environment suits. They might be technicians, or they could be soldiers, but they were not expecting a fight.”
“They are expecting one now. Smythe, pull back now.”
“Sir-”
“Smythe,” Skippy spoke directly to the STAR team commander. “Joe is right, for the wrong reason. Pull your teams back. I can take care of the enemy, but your team is in the way.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. “What are you planning, Skippy?”
“Those docking bay doors are not armored. We can burn through them, straight into the inner compartments. Make a hole, send in a missile equipped with antipersonnel submunitions. I have bots swapping out a warhead right now, be ready to launch in twenty-seven seconds.”
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