Cauldron of Ghosts

by David Weber

  The Mk 19—actually, these were Mk 19Ts, the export version especially modified for Torch’s requirements—was a bit larger than a standard cargo shuttle, but not hugely so. With the same variable wing geometry as the Royal Manticoran Navy’s pinnaces, it was capable of landing up to one hundred twenty-five troops in full battle armor or up to two hundred in regular battle dress or armored skin suits on just about any imaginable surface. It was more heavily armored than a pinnace, with a pair of thirty-millimeter pulsers mounted in its bow and a dorsal turret which mounted a twenty-millimeter tribarrel. It had twice as many hardpoints for external ordinance as the standard pinnace did, and also fitted a modest internal weapons bay.

  All in all, the Mk 19 Tango was well-suited to handing out mayhem, homicide, and devastation, yet there was no drama about their deployment. No sounding trumpets, no stirring music—indeed, no fuss or bother at all. Four of them simply slid out of the freighter’s bays, each loaded with fifty skinsuited Marines, and began accelerating towards Balcescu Station at five hundred gravities.

  The frigates’ departure was no more spectacular. Hali Sowle simply dropped her wedge long enough for the warships to deactivate their tractors. Then the freighter’s heavy cargo-handling tractors, fitted with the standard industrial tractor/pressor heads, thrust them gently away from her. She didn’t really need to move them far—just enough for their maneuvering thrusters to clear their threat zone of her hull—but Ganny El wasn’t taking any chances with her paint. The pressors moved them gently but firmly five hundred meters clear of her ship before they disengaged, at which point they engaged their own thrusters and went darting away. They had to get at least a hundred and fifty kilometers clear of her before any of them could bring their wedges up once more, but they were over a million kilometers out of range of any shipkiller missiles Balcescu Station might have managed to conceal from them.

  As soon as they reached a safe range, one of them—Denmark Vesey—also went immediately to five hundred gravities of acceleration, slightly behind the assault shuttles which had required no persnickety maneuvers before bringing up their own wedges. Her destination, however, was not Balcescu Station but the closer of the two starships which had departed from it. Her sister ship Gabriel Prosser, on the other hand, remained in close company with Hali Sowle as both of them continued to decelerate, although at a somewhat higher rate. At 225 Gs, she and the freighter would come to a halt relative to Balcescu Station at a range of just over eight hundred thousand kilometers, rather than the zero/zero solution she’d been headed for at 176 Gs. That would be far enough to keep her out of any mischief where hidden energy weapons might be concerned, and Gabriel Prosser’s counter missiles and point defense should be more than sufficient to cover both of them against any missile threat the station might present.

  * * *

  “Oh . . . shit.” Béla Harsányi had been supervising Hali Sowle’s approach. That made him the first person in Balcescu Station’s flight control center to see the incoming tramp freighter suddenly transform into a gargoyle. “Hey! Hey! We got trouble, people!”

  András Kocsis scowled but didn’t look up. In fact, he’d only half-heard Harsányi’s panicky shout. He was involved at secondhand in a dispute between Balcescu Station’s cargo management systems supervisor and Luigi Pirandello’s purser—a dispute made even more irritating because the freighter was over eight million kilometers from the station, which put the next best thing to one full minute’s com lag into the acrimonious discussion.

  Csilla Ferenc, on the other hand, was listlessly working her way through a stack of routine correspondence. Prince Sundjata was fifty million kilometers downrange, the next best thing to two hours out and less than three hours from the hyper limit, and Cargo Management had found no fault in her purser’s paperwork. That meant Csilla had had no excuse not to finally deal with her backlogged electronic mail.

  Harsányi’s sudden exclamation provided her with one.

  “What’s wrong, Béla?” she asked, rising immediately and moving to the other controller’s console. She was concerned, but not unduly alarmed. Béla was a nice guy, but he was a worrywart. Truth be told, he really wasn’t suited for his job. Csilla thought he’d do better if he transferred to some occupation that was less stressful for him—although, given Harsányi’s jitters, that might only be something like supervising janitorial remotes.

  The moment she saw his display, though, her moderate concern spiked. Within three seconds, once she’d fully grasped what was happening—the main features, anyway—she was in a state of terror. That sudden, purposeful cluster of small craft impeller signatures accelerating towards Balcescu Station couldn’t be mistaken for anything but an assault. And while it was possible there was a pirate somewhere in the galaxy stupid enough to attack a Jessyk Combine base, it was far more likely that this was something much, much worse than that. It had “military” written all over it, and while she watched, the freighter’s impeller signature reappeared as she brought her wedge back up.

  And so did the signatures of the smaller, faster, but much-bigger-than-any-assault-shuttle vessels on either side of her. That screamed “military” even more loudly than the assault shuttles did, and she swallowed hard. This was completely outside her experience and had only been covered in her (long past) training in a perfunctory manner.

  And the reason that training had been perfunctory, she had concluded at the time, was because if something like this ever happened, anyone it happened to would be so well and truly screwed that all the training in the galaxy would make exactly zero difference to what happened to her.

  Harsányi seemed paralyzed, so Ferenc hit the headset button that gave her a direct link to the station’s CO—both his personal cabin as well as the command deck.

  “Code Red! Code Red! That freighter’s launching an attack on the station!” As frightened as she was, she took a moment to double check what she saw on the display. “We have three—no, four—incoming shuttles, and she’s launched a couple of warships! One of them’s headed our way at five hundred gravities! They’re maybe twenty minutes out and coming in fast!”

  * * *

  Zoltan Somogyi heard Ferenc’s screeched warning, but it was no more than another background element in his mosaic of sudden disaster. Sophie Bordás had picked up Hali Sowle’s abrupt transformation almost as quickly as Harsányi, and by the time Ferenc’s confirmation reached the command deck, Somogyi was already listening to quite a different message.

  “—Toussaint, commanding the RTNS Bastille and the Royal Torch Marines who will be arriving aboard your station in about nineteen minutes. I urge you to surrender immediately, but it won’t exactly break our hearts if you don’t. Here are our terms of engagement should you decide not to, however. If you choose to resist, we will follow the laws of war as established in the Deneb Accords . . . up to a point. Any combatant who surrenders will be taken prisoner and not harmed. If, however—I will say this once, and once only—you murder, or cause to be murdered, or allow to be murdered any slave aboard the station, your lives are forfeit. All of them. Any of you who are armed or in uniform will be summarily executed. Any civilians in the employ of the station or any political institution or transstellar using or connected to the station will also be executed. Again, I strongly urge you to surrender immediately. You stand no chance against us, and an immediate surrender may avoid any little . . . unpleasantness should a single slave aboard that station be killed.”

  When the voice identifying itself as Colonel Toussaint finished speaking, Somogyi and Sophie Bordás stared at each other. Then, as if they shared the same spinal cord, they both simultaneously swiveled their chairs and looked at a control console against the bulkhead five meters away. Then—again simultaneously—they looked at the security guard standing watch at the entrance to the command deck.

  The station’s CO pointed a slightly shaking finger at the console. “Corporal Laski, move over there and guard that console. Take your sidearm out of its holster.
If anyone—anyone at all, except me—approaches you, shoot them. Immediately.”

  The corporal was no more than twenty T-years old. He did as he was told, but his eyes were wide and he looked to be a little shaky himself—especially when he drew his pulser. Bordás hissed in alarm. She thought the kid was just as likely to shoot one of them by accident as he was to fend off—

  Fend off who? Who would be insane enough to trigger the controls that launched the automatic spacing mechanisms in every slave hold on the station and caused the death of more than two thousand slaves? Those controls were only there as a last resort in the event of a slave rebellion that spread beyond a single hold and threatened the entire station. It had never been used. It had actual dust on it.

  But she knew the answer as soon as she asked herself the question. Not all of the people directly involved in the slave trade were . . . normal. Some of them were as psychologically twisted as a pretzel.

  “That’s not going to do any good!” she cried. “Every hold has its own set of controls!”

  “I know that,” Somogyi said through clenched teeth. He’d swiveled back to his console. “But it’s the best I can do from here. What the hell is happening? Get me—who’s in command of the security force this shift?”

  “Binford.”

  “Get him.”

  “Yes, Sir!”

  It took less than five seconds for Bordás to make the connection, and Jeremy Binford sounded insanely normal when he answered.

  “Hi, Soph!” he said cheerfully. “What can I do for you?”

  She started to scream at him, then swallowed hard. Of course he sounded calm. Nobody outside Flight Control and the command deck had any inkling yet of the disaster speeding towards them.

  “Somogyi needs to talk to you,” she said tersely, instead, and switched the connection to the CO’s console.

  “That you, Binford?” Somogyi said, then went straight on. “Look, I don’t have much time to explain, but in about twenty minutes—”

  * * *

  At first, the consternation on Prince Sundjata’s bridge wasn’t nearly as great as it was on Balcescu Station. The slave ship was still well over a hundred and fifty million kilometers—and almost two and a half hours at her present acceleration rate—from the hyper limit. But she was also over 2.3 light-minutes from the station, well outside the range of anything which might happen in its immediate surroundings. Gravitic scanners were FTL, and Prince Sundjata’s sensors had quickly detected the shuttles’ impeller signatures, but for all their combat power, the Mk 19Ts were obviously small craft, and equally obviously headed for the station, not launching any whimsical pursuit of the departing slave ship.

  That changed radically about six minutes after she’d picked up the shuttles, however.

  “We’ve got trouble coming, Ma’am,” Mason Scribner, Prince Sundjata’s sensor officer, said as he turned away from his console. “I’ve got two more impeller signatures. One of them’s matching decel with the freighter, but the other one’s accelerating like a bat out of hell. I think that one’s coming after us and the Luigi Pirandello.”

  “Not heading for the station?” Bogunov asked sharply.

  “Could be,” Scribner conceded. He was the closest thing the slave ship had to a tactical officer, although no one was more aware than he was of his limited qualifications for that post, but he shook his head. “If those are assault shuttles, they aren’t going to need anybody else’s firepower to deal with anything Somogyi could think about throwing at them. Besides, the one staying back with the freighter’s better placed to support any assault. We’ll know for sure in another two or three minutes, when the shuttles have to make turnover for their zero/zero with the station. If this other bastard doesn’t flip with them, then he’s damn sure coming after us.”

  “What is he, do you think?”

  “From their acceleration, they’ve got to be warships,” Scribner replied. “The lead one—I guess we should label it ‘Bogey One’—is pulling right on five hundred gravities. That means a military-grade impeller. And it’s small.”

  “A destroyer?”

  “Not even that big, Ma’am.”

  “Well . . . fuck.”

  “Smaller than a destroyer” meant either frigates or LACs, Bogunov thought, and none of the military forces who regularly used such ships were going to be friendly. And if they were frigates, then most likely they belonged to . . .

  If Prince Sundjata couldn’t make it over the alpha wall, they were really and truly screwed. It was sometimes a death sentence if a slaver was caught by the Manties, Haven, or Beowulf, which was bad enough. But only Torch would be sending frigates here, and that was very bad. If their captors were actually ex-slaves themselves, that death sentence was probably pretty much guaranteed.

  She pressed a stud on the arm of her command chair.

  “Engineering,” a voice untouched by the alarm coursing through her own veins replied.

  “Mitch, it’s the captain,” she said crisply. “How good is our compensator?”

  “What?” The chief engineer’s voice still wasn’t alarmed, but it was clearly surprised. “It’s fine, Ma’am. Uh, is there some reason it shouldn’t be?”

  “Not yet,” she told him a bit more grimly. “But I want you to cut the margin to zero.”

  There was silence for a moment, then the sound of a cleared throat.

  “Are you sure about that, Ma’am? I know I said it’s fine, but we’re over two thirds of the way through the current maintenance cycle. If we put that kind of stress on it, we could—”

  “I know,” Bogunov cut him off.

  And she did know. According to The Book, civilian-grade inertial compensators were never supposed to be run at more than eighty percent of their theoretical maximum. The only good thing about the failure of a compensator at high rates of acceleration was that the people aboard the ship in which it was fitted would probably be dead before they knew anything about it. A couple of hundred uncompensated gravities would turn them into anchovy paste on the bulkheads with terrifying efficiency. The chances of a compensator failure weren’t especially high, although the curve bent upward sharply as you got closer to full power, but it seldom gave you any warning before it failed. That meant maxing the compensator wasn’t something that gave you any margin at all for error. But—

  “I know,” she repeated. “But someone’s attacking the station, and we’ve got at least two warships—probably frigates,” she added, knowing he could figure out who they most likely belonged to as well as she could “—and they’re pulling five hundred gravities. I need those extra fifty gees, Mitch.”

  There was another, briefer silence. Then—

  “I guess you do, Ma’am. You’ll have full power in twenty seconds.”

  “Good.”

  Bogunov released the stud and turned towards Tabitha Crowley, her astrogator. There was a reason she’d gone to maximum power, despite the risks involved. At a hundred seventy gravities, they wouldn’t beat anything that could pull five hundred gravities to the hyper wall. Oh, it was unlikely any pursuer could actually overhaul them before they escaped into hyper, but missiles might be another matter entirely. She needed to get together with Matsuzawa and Scribner and figure out—

  She paused as she found herself looking at the visitors she’d invited onto the command deck—and now wished she hadn’t. Whether or not they really understood what was happening, they clearly understood enough to be worried as hell, and she couldn’t blame them.

  “I’ll have to ask you all to return to your quarters.”

  “No.” That came from the man who was their . . . guardian. “We all need to be in one room.”

  Bogunov winced. She couldn’t help it. She wasn’t supposed to know why the Gaul—what was his name? Zhukov? something like that—was aboard or even that he was a Gaul. Then again, she knew quite a few things she wasn’t supposed to know, and she’d transported some unsavory and . . . high-risk passengers other than slaves in her
day. That was why she’d used the ship’s com systems to eavesdrop on these passengers. No names had been given to her before they departed Balcescu Station, but she’d overheard a brief snatch of conversation between the man—Zachariah—and one of the women. She didn’t pretend to understand what either of them did or who they worked for, but clearly whoever it was had no intention of allowing their knowledge—whatever the hell it might be—to fall into enemy hands. It wasn’t the first time someone who worked for the Jessyk Combine and Manpower had encountered a similar situation; both transstellars paid well, but were also ruthless about eliminating employees who might have compromised their operations.

  And that was why she knew Zhukov—or whatever the hell his name was—wanted them all in one compartment: so he could kill all of them if they were going to be captured. She had no idea what information they possessed might be so dangerous to whoever had sent him along to kill them, and she didn’t want to know, just as she’d been very careful to refrain from anything that even looked like she might be trying to find out who’d given him his orders in the first place. From their drawn expressions, however, it was obvious that the three scientists were as aware of why Zhukov—or whoever—was there as she was.

  “There’s an officers’ lounge just down the passage,” she said, pointing to the bridge hatch. “Second hatch on the left.”

  He nodded, then waved his charges toward the exit.

  “Let’s go, people.”

  They didn’t move.

  “Now,” he said, drawing a small pulser from his jacket.

  The male scientist made a face, but turned to go. The two women fell into line behind him. Their keeper brought up the rear.