In the Black

by Patrick S. Tomlinson

  “Good, do what you can to obscure your drive plume behind our outgoing ship killers. Make your way for the frigate at full clandestine burn.”

  “We’re not rendezvousing with Ansari?” Okuda asked.

  Susan looked back at the hold full of her marines in full battle rattle and smiled.

  “Not just yet. Who’s up for a boarding action?”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  “They’re firing on each other, Derstu,” Kivits said, mandibles loose, sitting at the husk alcove like he’d just been punched in the mouth.

  “They’re doing what?” Thuk asked, a green leaf still dangling out of his own mouthparts.

  “They’re throwing everything, light-spears, javelins; they’re not close enough for sling bolts, but…”

  “Who shot first?”

  “The newcomers, but not at the Ansari, at the shuttle they launched. It was destroyed, utterly. Then the Ansari lit up the dark ocean like Ancestor’s Day.”

  “Transfer to the display. Go back up the timestream to the first shot.”

  Kivits did so, and the tactical situation their hidden husks observed was fed into the ring of solid light around the mind cavern. It was as Kivits had said. The middle-sized ship, likely one of the Mosaic-class heavy cruisers that had been in CCDF service for twenty-five cycles now from its profile, had destroyed a shuttle with its claws. Ansari answered almost instantaneously with an all-out barrage of javelins, still in flight, and light-spears. One of which struck home on the newly declared enemy Mosaic cruiser with spectacular effect.

  Thuk unexpectedly found himself pounding the armrest of his chair with a midarm in triumph at the shot, as if his own harmony had landed the blow themselves. But reality quickly settled back in. No matter if the hit was luck or skill, in the final tactical analysis, it wasn’t going to swing the balance in favor of a single ship against three aggressors, two of which out-massed and out-clawed the defender. Ansari was fighting a valiant, courageous, and utterly doomed battle against a vastly superior foe.

  Exactly what he would have expected from Captain Susan. But to what end?

  “What in the abyss is going on over there?” Hurg pleaded.

  “Seven Sacrifices,” Kivits swore. “They’re protecting us.”

  “Explain,” Thuk said.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Kivits pointed at the crushing weight of the enemy force converging on the Ansari. “They came as soon as they received that messenger husk to meet up with Susan’s ship to either capture or kill us. She refused. Now they’re going to kill her for it, then come after us. She’s purchasing time for us to escape with her ship and her life.”

  “That’s a pretty big swing in your estimation of our new friends, Kivits,” Thuk admonished.

  Kivits pointed a blood-claw at the Ansari’s icon, even as it swatted away incoming javelins. “I may be prejudiced, but I’m not blind, Thuk.”

  “Hurg, get Lynz on the mouth immediately.”

  “Lynz here,” the three-legged attendant’s voice said as if through water. He was still on the outer hull, then.

  “Attendant, it’s Thuk. I need to spin a seedpod and I need to do it right now.”

  “We’re sewing up the last of the coils now, Derstu.”

  “Good. Finish up, to Abyss with the plating, and let me know the moment your people are in the lockouts. Thuk out.”

  “We’re making our escape, then?” Kivits asked hopefully. “We can’t let Susan’s sacrifice be for nothing.”

  “No,” Thuk said, wrath building in his abdomen, pushing out against his plates until it felt as if he might burst at the joints. “No, we will not.”

  * * *

  Matching velocity and course with a squirrelly patrol/escort frigate executing combat maneuvers was difficult, even for a shuttle. Doing so without breaking stealth and being detected by said frigate’s sensor crew should have been impossible.

  But the flight crew piloting Susan’s shuttle had a few advantages unavailable to the average hostile. The copilot had served on one of the Halcyon’s sister ships in their last rotation and knew all sorts of interesting things about the class’s sensor coverage. At close ranges, local EM interference and wave-cancellation effects caused gaps in the various radar and lidar arrays. Pilots were trained to avoid these blind spots to stay within the space control officer’s awareness. Instead, the crew used the gaps to hide from prying eyes.

  Further, the people operating the sensors onboard Halcyon weren’t looking for a SpecOps shuttle, but were very intently focused on swapping spitballs with the Ansari. Susan had risked a quantum-coded burst transmission via whisker laser back to Miguel in the CIC to tell him they were about to link up and would you please stop shooting at the Halcyon. He obeyed without sending an acknowledgement, giving them a narrow window to risk the boarding dock without having to worry about getting cored by friendly fire, or their target suddenly going into evasive maneuvers to dodge a warhead.

  Now, they were less than a minute away from docking with a CCDF warship in the first blue-on-blue hostile boarding action in the history of the fleet. The gravity of the situation was not lost on the marines.

  “Last chance, people,” Okuda barked. “As of now, we’re all still on firm legal footing. We were just the security detail delivering our rogue captain to the proper authorities. We’d already launched when the shooting started, and played no part in the XO’s decision to return fire. But!” Okuda held up a gauntleted finger, then pointed at the inner airlock door. “The second we walk through that hatch, we’re mutineers, deserters, traitors, and a whole list of creative expletives yet to be written. Anyone who isn’t ready for that, speak up now!”

  The assembled marines looked around the cabin. Susan hadn’t spent enough time down in grunt country to know if they were looking for the first domino to fall, or applying peer pressure to anyone who might be vacillating.

  One private cleared his throat and raised an arm.

  “You have something to say, Culligan?” Okuda said.

  The young man squared his jaw, but looked at Susan directly. “I’m sorry, mum. I have no objection to what you’re doing. But my big sister is on the Halcyon, and I don’t—I mean, if I had to…” He began to tear up, droplets floating away from his face in the zero g.

  Susan grabbed a handhold, swung over to the private, and squeezed his upper arm. “Okuda?”

  “Yes, mum?”

  “We need someone to hold back and guard the shuttle so we don’t get cut off if we need an emergency evac.” It was a polite fiction. Once the Halcyon’s crew knew they were inside, falling back to the shuttle just meant they’d be swatted out of space with CiWS like an oversized gnat as soon as they got far enough away for a clean firing arc. But neither was she going to put a nineteen-year-old in a position where he might have to shoot his own sibling.

  Picking up on the thread, Okuda played along. “Culligan, you’re pulling guard duty for the shuttle. Keep our backsides clear. Understood?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the private said brightly.

  “And nobody’s going to say a fucking word about it to him later, right?”

  “No, ma’am!” clapped back the rest of the platoon.

  “Good! Our objective is the CIC. Deck schematics have already been loaded into your VRs. Watch your doors and corners, and avoid long hallways whenever you can. ROE is if they have weapon in hand, light them up like Times Square on New Year’s. Noncombatants to be bound with zip-strips and secured in place. There aren’t enough of us to babysit and they can wait a couple hours until we can get back to them. If they piss their pantaloons before then, too bad. Any questions?”

  None were forthcoming.

  “Excellent! Now, who’s ready to take this tin-can piece of shit away from the motherfuckers trying to blow up our house?”

  “OOHRAH!”

  “Outstanding! Final kit check. Double-check weapons and suit seals. If they’re smart, they’ll get in skin suits and pump out the air in case we start pok
ing holes in that cardboard-thick hull if the shooting starts. Trigger discipline. Anyone fires a round before we contact armed resistance, I’ll shoot you in the knee.”

  “Taking out their whisker laser,” the shuttle’s gunner said from the flight deck. Outside, a 37 mm autocannon put a single, expertly placed round into the small swelling at the base of the Halcyon’s coms laser. The shot didn’t destroy the lens, but it did take out its data bus. Both easier to repair, and more likely to be believed as collateral damage from the tens of thousands of high-speed shrapnel fragments flying around the battle space. As soon as they docked, the shuttle would begin pumping out high-frequency jamming to neutralize the frigate’s omnidirectional.

  “Ten seconds to docking,” the copilot announced over the intercom. “Brace, brace, brace!”

  The marines in their power-assisted armor gripped their handholds and footholds and locked their suits into place. It was as good as being strapped down hard into a crash harness, so long as the capacitors held a charge.

  Susan was not qualified in the marine’s exosuits, and was decked out instead in a flexible skinsuit with built-in trauma plates covering her core, and flexible, impact-hardening fibrous armor rated for small arms covering the rest of her. It had no power assistance, and if anyone pointed much more than a handgun at her in anger, she may as well salute them and say her prayers to Shiva. It also meant that at the call from the flight deck, she had only a few seconds to get herself into one of the chairs along the wall and bring the harness down over her shoulders and torso.

  The pulsing proximity tone of the shuttle’s built-in anticollision lidar beeped from the cockpit ever faster until it merged into a single, uninterrupted tone. The deck jolted underfoot as the energy of impact with the relatively huge Halcyon reverberated through the shuttle’s bones.

  “Solid lock,” the copilot said. “Board is green.”

  “Go, go, go!” Okuda shouted into the com as Susan struggled to get out of her crash harness. The outer airlock door swung inward, revealing a fleet-standard emergency evacuation hatch bearing the stenciled moniker CCDF HALCYON: FF-109.

  Susan’s breath caught in her throat. Everything came down to the next two seconds. On her order, the pilot would ping the Halcyon’s computer system with an emergency code. All airlocks and external evacuation hatches on CCDF ships could be overrode using a fleet-standard emergency code that rotated every few months along with routine software updates. The code was uniform across all ships to facilitate search-and-rescue teams responding to disasters so they didn’t have to worry about interfacing with a ship’s central computer system while the fires were burning.

  If no one onboard Halcyon had thought to change or block the code, and there was no reason they should because no one had ever tried to use it offensively before, the hatch would pop open and Susan’s marines would swarm inside like angry wasps. If someone had, well …

  Susan exhaled. “Pilot, send the code.”

  On command, the evac hatch sank fifteen centimeters and rolled into the space between hull layers to make way for the search-and-rescue team that wasn’t coming. Okuda wasted no time on celebrations and pushed off into enemy territory, managing the transition from zero g to grav plating like a seasoned professional. The rest of the platoon followed like a river cutting its way to the sea.

  Susan held back, after mutually agreeing to Okuda’s demands that she stay on the shuttle until they’d secured a beachhead. She took the opportunity to type out a text-only order to Miguel to change Ansari’s hatch codes immediately in case anyone on the Carnegie or Paul Allen figured out the trick and felt inspired.

  “Beach is clear, mum,” Okuda’s voice came over her suit helmet’s com. Susan got up from her seat and nodded to Private Culligan as she passed.

  “Watch my ass, Private.”

  “Eyes on, mum.”

  Susan winked at him and drifted the short distance to the Halcyon, stumbling only a little as she passed into the local gravity.

  There wasn’t time to dawdle. At only twelve vertical decks and seventeen thousand metric tons, the Zephyr-class fast frigate was just about as small as it was possible for a crewed warship to be. It didn’t even mount a third redundant Alcubierre ring as all other military ships did. Little more than a triple cluster of fusion rockets, a modestly sized A/M reserve, a handful of recon drones and offensive missile cells, and low-volume life support system, it traded firepower, survivability, and endurance for raw speed. It was designed more for shore patrol duties in developed systems, fast enough to chase down smugglers, tariff-jumpers, and corsair ships with just enough teeth to force compliance or finish them off. In a fleet support role, it acted as an area-denial weapon and enhanced recon platform, with a focus on extended fire coordination for the rest of the task group.

  All of which meant the crew complement was small enough to be manageable for the force Susan brought to the party, but also that their response time now that they knew unwanted guests were aboard would be short. It would be a symbolic victory at best, but it was the only of the three ships in the task force Susan’s marines had any chance of capturing without getting scraped off the bottom of the crew’s boots, so here they were.

  “Stay out of the lift tubes,” Okuda told her marines. “Stick to crew ladders.”

  This was met with a collective groan as everyone assembled envisioned climbing one-handed up a ladder while holding an assault rifle in the other, but Okuda was having none of it. “Secure the whining. That’s the deal. I’ll go first so none of you frilly blouses have to wrinkle yourselves. Mum, in the middle where we can keep an eye on you, if you please.”

  “Yes, Mother.” Susan said to a round of hesitant laughter. “C’mon, grunts, this isn’t your funeral!”

  That had the desired effect. Okuda slung her rifle and pulled a sidearm from the breastplate holster of her armor and galloped up the nearest crew ladder. Not wanting to be shown up by their old lady, several marines followed in rapid fire. A second fire team settled for another crew ladder a little further down the hall to give flanking cover to the first team.

  “Mum, if you’ll follow me?” a random marine whose name Susan hadn’t memorized asked.

  “After you, Sergeant.”

  They made it three full decks before meeting resistance, but when they finally did, it hit fast, and it hit hard.

  “Contact left!” Okuda shouted into the secure com link, but she’d spotted it a split second too late. As expected, the Halcyon’s crew had evacuated the atmosphere below the CIC deck in hopes of slowing the intruders down. The marines’ powered armor had a limited self-sealing capacity for bullet punctures, but large tears from fragmentation grenades, debris, or knives would still force whole limb sections of their suits into tunicate mode at the nearest joint to prevent embolisms from causing a stroke in the victim’s brain.

  Which is why no one heard the first antipersonnel mine go off. It was a bold introduction.

  “Man down! Suppressive fire! My right!” The rhythmic staccato of automatic weapons fire vibrated through the corridor despite the vacuum as Okuda drove her personal answer to the ambush home with bloody intention. Soon, an entire fire team’s worth of frangible boarding rounds joined in from behind her at eight hundred beats per minute. Whomever had set off the mine disappeared into a fine red mist before they could shit themselves.

  But they weren’t alone. The Halcyon’s reduced contingent of marines opened up from three angles in three dimensions. They were just a single fire team, but they had the advantage of picking the place and time of the fight, and they were defending their home turf, which made each and every one of them incredibly dangerous.

  “Two can play at that game,” Okuda said. “Fall back, we need a new angle on them.”

  “What about Chu?” someone called.

  “His suit’ll pinch off the bleeding until we get to him. Unless anyone volunteers for that wood chipper?”

  No volunteers presented themselves.

 
“Right. Break into pairs. Cover each other on opposite sides of the halls, pick a ladder and get climbing, two levels up. We’re coming down on these asshats.”

  It took almost ten minutes of sneaking around, disabling hastily placed booby traps, and swapping bullets before Okuda’s forces got into position to flush out the defenders. They were dug in well and wearing power-assisted armor only a generation behind what her marines had brought over. Secondhand stuff passed down from “frontline” units, but well-maintained and damned near as effective. Normal nonlethal options were therefore off the table, as their suits had safeguards against the blinding/deafening effects of flashbang grenades, and were sealed against tear or knockout gas canisters.

  “Okay, we’re set. Vasquez, Ingersoll, spring the trap in five, four…”

  “Wait,” Susan cut in. “Give them a chance to surrender.”

  “But we’ve got them dead to rights!”

  “Yes, exactly. You’ve got them over a barrel. They’re marines just like you, defending their home. Give them the option to stand down. If they don’t take it, by all means. But we will make the offer. We’re not killing our own if we can help it.”

  Okuda looked like she had more to say, but swallowed it and opened an unsecured, general announcement channel common across all marine coms.

  “Halcyon marines, this is Sergeant Okuda of the Ansari. You’re outnumbered, outgunned, and trapped in a tactically indefensible position. Clear your weapons, place them on the deck, deactivate any mines you may have set up, and you will not be harmed.”

  “Like you didn’t harm Aoki?” one of them shot back. “She didn’t feel it, at least.”

  “I’ve got a man probably bleeding out two decks down, so if you’re looking for an apology, you’re barking up the wrong tree, son. I’m feeling charitable, I’m giving you the chance to walk away from this. If not, I’m going to blow you up with grenades so you don’t get the satisfaction of taking any more of my people with you. Either way, we’re taking your CIC in the next five minutes. When that happens, you can be captives or corpses. Your call. Nine…”