Oort Rising

by Magnus Victor

  Klaus rolled his eyes. This was Johann's weakness: practical problems. "Ah, I see. So what's holding up the progress? The captain sent you a whole crew to help.”

  "Aye, a few. But they're green, new t' the field. It's takin' too much time to get each o' them up to speed, and there's half a million bloody lines to run through! The physics is sound, your replicator idea might even work, but we just canna' get everything ready fast enough. We'd need a much larger crew to get this done in less than days!"

  "All right. I know the people who can help. I'll get them down there ASAP." Klaus broke the connection. He checked his datapad, looking for the people he was thinking of.

  He checked the brig. James' co-workers, the techs who remained aboard when the union repair ship had left. "Dammit." He muttered.

  He didn't trust them — after all, they were the prime suspects for sabotaging the Overlord's drive system. At the same time, they were the best programmers on-board, according to their records and his conversations with James.

  But could Klaus trust them with his life?

  He shook his head. The Captain had said that the QMP system might be needed to save all of their lives. Maybe if he got that into the miners' heads, then they'd be trustworthy enough.

  And they were not in the brig. Instead they were deployed — under armed guard — as repair crews on the damaged warship, working on isolated systems far from any critical access. Klaus found the contact number for the ship's Marine commander, and silently thanked the Captain for reinstating his rank. He should have the authority to re-assign some of the prisoners. Enough, at least.

  LtCol. James T. Wood - Contact Lost. Hm. Next would be...

  Maj. Alex Stevens - Contact Lost. Odd. Then there's...

  Maj. Nareen Majarendran - Contact Lost.

  Klaus pinched the bridge of his nose, forcing back a growing headache. He was afraid of that happening. With so much of the Overlord's Marine complement transferred to the Tannenberg, their command structure had been decimated by the fighting there. Worse, it was most likely the experienced officers who had been transferred. That left...

  Lt. Shigeo Yashimoto. Good grief. According to personnel records, Yashimoto was one of the most junior officers aboard. He must not be that well-regarded, either — judging by the fact that he had been left behind while the rest of the Marine officers had been shipped to combat, on the Tannenberg.

  And probably passed over for a reason, knowing Klaus' luck. This might be a hard sell. If the man could think on his feet, he wouldn't have been left behind in the first place. And Klaus couldn't just pull rank on the Lieutenant, who was senior to him, even if it was a different service. Taking a deep breath, and promising himself to be as diplomatic as possible, he made the call.

  "Lieutenant Yashimoto here. What do you want, ah..." The disdain in his voice was clear before he even finished his sentence, "Senior Warrant Officer?" Klaus was certain he heard a muttered "squid. "

  "Sir, I request that you detach ten of the local civilians working with the repair crew. Sir, we need them for work on the QMP system. They're the only qualified personnel aboard. Sir." Unless Klaus missed his guess, the Lieutenant would be quite specific about the usual military punctilio. He sent his authorization code, and the coordinates of Johann's lab. He toggled a cc to the Lieutenant's command, and to Commander Li on the bridge. He didn't have time for formal escalation, even though he was certain he would win, and hoped that Yashimoto would have the sense to realize the same thing.

  "Impossible." Came the flat reply. "They're needed for the repairs here. We can't possibly let them go on the say-so of some trumped-up—"

  "Captain Conagher's orders, sir." Klaus interrupted. He was trying to pull rank, but diplomatically. Although he was right, technically. Sort of. He hoped the magic words would be enough.

  "I don't care what the—" The voice quieted, as if interrupted by another person. The lieutenant's voice was muted, but he could make out the off-mic conversation. "What did you say, Gunnery Sergeant?"

  Klaus held his breath. He'd been hoping that the Marines would have left a competent senior enlisted with an officer like that. Even the Marines should realize that too much could go wrong, otherwise.

  "Very well." The Lieutenant's voice was back, stronger this time. He barked the words, as if he needed to take out his temper on someone. "We can let three of these men go. The Gunnery Sergeant—" Klaus could almost hear the glare "—will accompany them as guard. Out." The channel closed.

  "Thank you." Klaus answered to the dead mic. He let out his breath. Three was less than the five he had wanted, which was why he had asked for ten. Still, he owed that Gunny a drink when this was all over.

  *^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*

  Antoniy clung to the outside of the assault gun, his forearms and hip burning from the strain. "Command, we've nearly reached the approach corridor. ETA thirty seconds."

  With the ship on lockdown, the only remaining entrance to the bridge was along a hundred-meter corridor, arrow-straight and kept clear of obstacles. It was designed as an effective killing ground for the defenses lining the hatchway leading to the command deck.

  Had the rebels managed to get inside the bridge itself? If that were indeed the case, then the vessel would be in very dire straits. The Marines' low-energy weapons were back in the armory. Firing their coilguns — let alone the assault gun's railguns — anywhere inside the bridge would likely cripple the Tannenberg.

  If the enemy had posted any defense, the whole corridor would be a death trap. No way would Antoniy send his troops into that killing zone without eyes. He contacted command. "Should we proceed or hold for backup?"

  "Proceed, lieutenant. Rebels in possession of bridge. Avoid damaging the controls as best as you can, but neutralize all enemy presence in the bridge.”

  Well, so much for hoping that the fight was going well. He swayed briefly, blinking away his dizziness, and straightened. When he had transferred to Intelligence, he had never imagined himself in this position. He wasn't trained for it - hell, none of his troops had this kind of combat experience - and that made him nervous. He put the distraction aside. For better or worse, he and his squad would have to do. "Confirmed. Advancing. Ship's systems are down. Request status of friendlies."

  “Friendly forces in bridge area un-reachable.” With the communicators being built into the suits' helmets, that meant the troops were either KIA or captured. “Nearest reinforcements ETA over five minutes.” The voice was strained. “You're it, Lieutenant.”

  He swallowed, hard. Thirteen seconds until they hit the bend in the corridor. If rebel troops had slipped this deep inside the Tannenberg without being noticed, they couldn't be the green conscripts whom Antoniy had fought earlier.

  "Halt the tank!" he commanded.

  "Assault gun, sir." muttered the driver, as he brought the vehicle to a stop.

  "Everybody dismount. Gutierrez, deploy the shield. Infantry to follow behind the assault gun down the corridor.

  It struck him that this was almost exactly the reverse of the earlier skirmish. An assault gun advancing around a corner, supported by infantry. But Antoniy's Marines were a cut – several cuts – above the rebel troops they'd faced earlier.

  Antoniy linked his helmet HUD to the gun cameras of the assault gun. At least there was one advantage of the rebels using stolen mil-spec weapons. The corridor beyond was clear. They'd set the assault gun's grav systems to project a stasis field ahead of it, so that no sound escaped to warn the enemy. Nothing but a slight breeze, and if their Commander was not experienced enough to recognize what that meant...

  "Move up." With the infantry following, the assault gun rounded the corner.

  To his surprise, the wind changed direction, blowing hurricane-force the wrong way past the vehicle, sending the men scrambling into the lee behind the lumbering vehicle. The assault gun itself slowed to a crawl, fighting against literally tons of pressure. At this rate, it would take several minutes to reach the other end.
>
  "I'm not doing it!" shouted the driver. "It's the ship!"

  Antoniy swore. That must mean the bridge crew hadn't had time to scram the systems. But it was only a quick procedure to do that. Had they been betrayed from the inside, or had the rebels somehow gotten the systems back online that quickly?

  He needed a Plan B, and yesterday. His HUD showed no rebel forces in the corridor. The defensive weapons flanking the hatchway at the other end were half-melted, obviously out of commission. His main enemy, then, was time.

  The assault gun could move down the hall faster, but it would have to redirect all of its grav systems to propulsion. This would mean that they would not be able to boost friendly projectiles heading down-range, so a firefight in the hallway would be risky. If that happened, they would have to halt the vehicle to re-direct the gravity systems. The fight would be in their favor then, but at the cost of their forward progress.

  But maybe they wouldn't have to fight in the corridor. After all, it looked like the rebels expected the ship's wind and grav systems to hold them at bay. If he hadn't captured the assault gun earlier, the enemy plan would have worked perfectly. That explained why there were no troops.

  Even if it didn't, there was no option. "Re-set the systems. Retract the shield and keep advancing." That would move the tank as fast as possible. He glanced behind him. "The rest of you, close formation behind the tank."

  “Assault gun, sir.”

  Their goal was to reach the bridge hatch. Once through, the fight would be easier, as there were only environmental-support grav projectors within the bridge itself, far weaker than the defensive projectors in the hallway. They just had to get there.

  *^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*

  “Damn!” What the hell was that?! The Overlord shook wildly around Klaus, the corridor walls lurching at him and threatening to collapse the magnetic cocoon of the transport system. The envelope flared a reddish-brown against the encroaching walls, and Klaus gritted his teeth and swore, fighting to pull in a breath as the overload burned at his ribs. He could just picture himself ending up as nothing more than a red smear on the impersonal, gray metal of the corridor.

  Fortunately, the shaking stopped and the transport field stabilized. Klaus quickly ran his hands over the outside of his suit. No damage.

  Bless the engineers, he thought, for over-designing the system. Any engineer worth his salt knew enough to allocate at least an over-build factor of two to Murphy. No way that a jolt like that would be anywhere in their design specs.

  A warship, a capital ship no less, shaking this hard under fire was an idea found only in the cheap adventure books Klaus had loved as a child. An ancient, seagoing man'o'war might rock as she was hit, but the Overlord massed in the gigatons!

  The earlier hits to the ship hadn't been anywhere near this powerful. So what were the enemy hitting her with now?

  The fire in his ribs subsided. Thank God he was carrying his cargo on the other side. He quickly checked the computer strapped to his suit for damage. It looked intact, but he would have to check it when he arrived. He checked the mission map on his datapad — his was the last computer needing to be hooked up.

  But was his destination still in one piece?

  He keyed up the engineering's damage assessment. Ordinarily, the damage map of a warship was eyes-only for officers and those in charge of damage control parties. But bless the engineers, again. Their staff had wisely realized that such secrecy would only hinder the real workers, the ones who mattered. Engineering crews needed those data to hack workarounds, so they had made the damage maps available to all Engineering personnel. Which included data on just what had hit them.

  Klaus winced as the datapad scrolled through page after page of red and blinking schematics – thankfully, his section's control compartment was not among them – and stopped at the hull integrity report. He adjusted the scale, hardly believing his eyes. Red-marked gashes reached far into the ship’s interior, well into sections the designers had designated “green,” safe.

  Those could not have been any normal mass-driver rounds. The first ones that the rebel ship had slung into the Overlord were what he would have expected: large chunks of rock, the slag produced en masse by any mining operation. Enormous, true, but still not capable of surviving the ship's shields.

  The last round, though, judging by the incredible damage, must have been some kind of purpose-built armor-penetrating projectile. To run through the deflectors intact, the projectile must have carried its own gravity projectors, carefully arranged to counteract the Overlord's defenses. And to plunge that deep into the ship upon impact, it must have massed scores of tons, bigger than anything the Overlord's own axial guns could deliver!

  Klaus grudgingly gave a degree of admiration to the rebels. Rock slingers were slow, so if they slingshotted around the Verdun for speed, they must have radically modified the grav systems. Not easy to do without burning them out and killing everyone on board. And either they had designed and fabricated such ammunition in the blink of an eye, or they had prepared this ambush months ahead. Neither option seemed likely, and both had worrying implications.

  For one, nobody had intel that good. Or, more to the point, nobody would invest the kind of resources needed to build a projectile that large, based only on intel. No matter how good. So why had they gambled all of their resources like that?

  Which really made him think, his eyes not even seeing the corridor walls as they flashed past. What was really going on here? The Overlord had been a closely-guarded secret months ago, and no other warship near her scale had ever had her keel laid. Even if there had been a security breach, she had not even been tasked to the Oort Cloud until a few weeks ago, as far as he knew. And the rounds being fired at the Overlord now would be massive overkill on any other ship in the system, on any ship known, period, when the rounds were made.

  Any other ship, period. Klaus’ eyes widened in a growing suspicion, and no small amount of fear. He did some quick mental calculations. Andromeda station was around the right size for these rounds. He poked at the new idea, trying to convince himself he was wrong. But he couldn't.

  He now doubted what he had heard about the rebellion, all the assurances from civilians, all the casual assumptions of other servicemen. The rebels were on the run, they said, on the ropes. Just needing the final offensive to finish them off. Sure, every now and then some small patrol would get bushwhacked, but everybody knew that the days of the rebels were numbered.

  But targeting Andromeda station, a Navy stronghold? An organization like that, on its last legs, couldn’t possibly be ready for that scale of undertaking.

  It would be surprisingly simple, though. Klaus played out the scenario in his head. An unidentified vessel, the same one now slinging rounds into the Overlord, drops out of warp near Andromeda station. No alarm would be raised: it’s just another rock-hauler, probably with a transponder gone dead from lack of maintenance. The crew standing watch at the station would never see them as a threat.

  Suddenly, the purpose-built penetrator round – possibly many of them – would come screaming in towards the station, fast enough to get inside the outer reaction loop of the defenses, and the station certainly could not move out of the way. Klaus looked again at the damage wrought on the Overlord, a capital warship. Andromeda's structure would have been no match for such an attack. It would have been ripped apart.

  And with Andromeda Station, the hub of its patrols in the Oort Cloud gone, the Government would be hard-pressed to maintain any sort of presence in the outer System. That would have let the rebels consolidate and shore up their support. Given such a fait accompli, Earth might easily have negotiated, rather than send out further forces. After all, the Oort Cloud was a rich resource.

  But the rebels hadn’t counted on the Overlord, the first capital ship designed from the keel up for combat: the first true warship. And if he was right, if they had made the armor-piercing projectile to ambush Andromeda, most likely they only had the one.
They certainly would not have needed a second. He breathed a bit easier at that, notwithstanding his burning ribs.

  As if to prove how wrong he was, the Overlord once again rocked violently. The maglev cocoon flared again. Dammit! Did he have to keep tempting Murphy like that?

  The blanket of red on the damage-control screen was different this time. It was superficial, but spread all over the upper-starboard quarter, aft of the beam. That was not consistent with any sort of anti-armor projectile. Had the rebels only had the one shot, after all? He mentally crossed his fingers. Could this be good news? Klaus brought up more detail on the new damage.

  He blanched.

  Wrong again. A full quarter of the Overlord’s defensive force-field projectors were burnt out, completely out of service.

  The Captain’s voice cut into his intercom circuit, an all-hands. “That jolt was one of the enemy’s larger rounds missing us. We’re still in the fight, people. Carry on.”

  That explains things, even if it was not good news. Unlike Andromeda station, the Overlord could move. The Captain must have realized the same thing, and used the deflectors to provide one brief burst of acceleration and shove them out of the way. But the deflectors were never designed for such a load transient.

  Klaus smiled thinly. He supposed that losing a fraction of the ship’s primary line of defense was preferable to taking another of those station-killer rounds on the nose, in the sense that being shot in the lungs was preferable to being shot in the heart: one would most definitely kill you; the other would only probably kill you.

  *^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*

  Antoniy flinched as something hurtled towards him. A resounding 'CLANG' came from the front of the assault gun, and he realized that he had reacted to the image displayed on his HUD. Rookie mistake, he berated himself. The gun's cameras showed a chair: badly bent, padding charred and burned almost to the core. But bulky.