by Terry Mixon
As the driver rounds began to weave their patterns around the destroyers’ first salvoes, a second salvo of torpedoes launched from both Cadre ships, matched by eight more torpedoes from Oath, aimed at the second destroyer.
Brad ignored the outgoing weapons, his attention firmly riveted on the incoming torpedoes. The green dots of the driver rounds once again wove their complex pattern across the stars, trying to catch the torpedoes in their net. A torpedo vanished from the screen, then another.
A third was hit, its icon flickering, and then spiraled into a fourth, both vanishing from the screen. Half the salvo was gone, but even as the gatlings picked off a fifth, a third salvo launched from the enemy ships.
“Reset all gatlings to defense,” Brad ordered quietly, his gaze still locked on the screen. Jason didn’t acknowledge, but the lines on the screen shifted as all of Oath’s mass drivers focused on stopping the incoming torpedoes.
As the sixth and seventh torpedoes vanished, the back of Brad’s mind noted the lurch of another burst of driver hits. The screen showed the spinning vector cone of Oath’s course as Shelly took them into a tight spin that caused the eighth torpedo to flash by the ship, less than eight meters clear of the hull.
Almost simultaneously, the screen suddenly flashed white with an incredible energy signature. Their first salvo had just reached the lead destroyer.
“What the Dark was that?” Jason demanded, staring in shock as the screen cleared from the flash, showing that the destroyer had vanished.
“An abandoned Fleet project that someone gave me the specs for,” Brad said with a grin. “Personally, I think someone from the Cadre killed the project, because they seem to work just fine.”
He shot a look at Falcone, but she simply shrugged as if she had no idea what he was talking about. It was even possibly true. Brad honestly had no idea who had sent him the plans. Only that Hiroshi Kawa had gleefully agreed to build him some in exchange for the exclusive rights to build more once knowledge of them became more widespread.
“What were they?” Jason repeated slowly. “Were they nukes?”
“Of course not,” Brad said. “Fleet would never allow anyone other than themselves to have nukes. Those were specially designed to radiate energy in the scanner spectrum. Lots of it in a very short period of time. They blinded the destroyer, and that meant they couldn’t stop the other four torpedoes.”
“How did our torpedoes manage to see the enemy?” Shelly asked. “Wouldn’t they be blind too?”
“Our torpedoes have a special code in the scanners. There’s a little pulse of warning from the jammers before they go off. We can change that up if anyone ever figures it out, but our torpedoes shut off their scanners for a few seconds to avoid being blinded.” Brad shrugged. “We could do it for Oath’s sensors too, but even flash-blinded in one direction we can see everywhere else.
“Now they we’ve killed the one destroyer, we’re back on an even footing. The damned things are expensive, but I’ll use them on the other destroyer if we need to. Kill those torps, Jason.”
The lines of driver rounds had been sweeping around to take out the next salvos already in space from the destroyers. As the torps got closer, they became easier targets, and three more vanished in a few seconds. Then another.
But four more torpedoes were still burning in toward Oath. Brad felt the ship lurch as Shelly threw them into a violent evasive pattern. Jason picked off another torp in the few seconds she bought, two more shot by, missing by meters, and then the last slammed into his ship.
Alarms screeched through the ship as a hundred kilos of high-velocity metal ripped into the hull. The bridge blast door slammed shut, cutting off a sudden rush of air before it began.
Brad’s gaze was drawn inexorably back to the screen, watching the last salvo of torpedoes come racing in. For one horrible moment, the gatlings refused to fire as the torpedoes lunged toward them.
Jason cursed, but before Brad could say anything, the guns flickered online again.
Shelly’s evasive maneuvers and the motion added by the first impact had pulled them away from the incoming weapons, giving Jason a precious few seconds to begin tracking with the guns.
A tiny red warning suddenly flickered up on the screen, flashing the words Safety interlocks disengaged, and fire began to flash out far too fast from the mass drivers. Brad realized how Jason had gotten the guns to fire.
The gatlings spat their slugs at a rate of fire nearly double the safe “maximum” rate. Their weaving garrote closed around the remaining torpedoes and began to shatter each in turn.
The last torpedo died eighty kilometers short of Oath, and Brad breathed a sigh of relief.
“The other destroyer?” Brad demanded.
“Dead,” Jason said. “He died right before we killed the last of his torpedoes.”
Brad nodded. “And the transport?”
“Clean sweep,” Jason confirmed. “All ships destroyed.”
That wasn’t quite the outcome Brad had hoped for. If they didn’t have a useful vector, all of this would’ve been for nothing.
Brad touched his com. “Randall, report.”
Silence answered for a moment and then the engineer came on. “You want the bad news or the good?
“Both, of course.”
“All right,” the engineer replied with a sigh. “The bad news is that Gatling Five is gone, Drive Three is down hard, and we’ve lost atmosphere across a third of the ship.
“The good news is that I think I can get at least half of the overheated gatlings back online from the overload firing, and we still have all our torpedo tubes. If we all work at it, we can restore atmosphere within an hour, but the drive is down until we get to a shipyard.”
“Good enough,” Brad said, and meant it. Oath could’ve been in a lot worse shape. “I’ll meet you in Engineering in fifteen minutes and we can start working on damage control.”
“Understood. Randall out.”
Brad turned to Jason. “Do we know where those bastards were heading?”
“We got enough data on the transport before we blew it to make a guess, if they hadn’t planned to change course later. I think we’ve got enough vector information on the warships, too. If the two overlap, we have a target.”
“Get to working on it,” Brad ordered. “I think it’s time somebody paid the Terror a courtesy visit.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Thirty hours later, Brad knew they’d blown it. The vectors hadn’t led to anywhere the Terror would hide a base. No amount of toying with the vectors gave them an option that made any sense at all.
He sighed and looked around the wardroom at his exhausted crew. They’d repaired as much of the damage as they could without returning to the Io Yards. Now they needed to decide on their next course of action.
Saburo, Trista, and Lisa had done an admirable job getting the new combat team into shape. Thankfully, all were veterans and they knew what needed doing.
With Marshal gone, Shelly looked more strained. She’d taken up the duties of pilot as well as those of communications officer. Thankfully, with Dr. Duvall on board, she didn’t have to be the medic.
That said, he knew she’d been getting more on-the-job training as a medic while they had a true professional aboard. All that left little time to sleep.
Not that he personally knew what sleep was.
Randall looked dead on his feet. While the others had managed to grab some rest in between repairs, the engineer had been working full-out the whole time. His pale, drawn face concerned Brad, who fully intended to order the man to sleep for the next day or two once they’d finished the repairs.
Falcone had been spending her time over on the wrecks of the Cadre ships, looking for any clues. He didn’t hold out much hope. Each of the ships had left some fairly large pieces of debris, but the location of the Terror’s base wouldn’t just be lying around.
Jason was the last crew member at the meeting. His face was as grim and tired as th
e rest of them.
“We have nothing,” Brad said tiredly. “The vectors didn’t pan out.”
Everyone in the room sagged a little.
“After the first few hours, I was afraid of that,” Shelly said. “It should’ve been obvious where they were going. Only, it wasn’t anything more than a waypoint.”
The wardroom door opened and Falcone came in just in time to hear Shelly’s last sentence.
“That might be okay,” the Commonwealth agent said as she took a seat. “I found coordinates that might match the vector in a wrist-comp belonging to the dead transport pilot. It also had a radio frequency and a code to transmit.”
“And you think that means it will tell us where the Terror’s base is?” Trista asked, obviously holding Lisa’s hand under the table.
The similarity to how Jason and Shelly behaved amused Brad.
“There’s no other reason for that kind of shenanigans,” Falcone said. “Also, we recovered one of the cargo pods intact. It hadn’t been secured as well as it should’ve been and came loose in the last-minute evasive maneuvers. I think you’ll find the cargo illuminating.”
She commandeered the console and brought a series of images up on the screen. The pod was filled with torpedoes. Ones with a very distinctive golden halo on the tip.
“Are those what I think they are?” Brad asked.
“If you think they’re nuclear torpedoes intended for Fleet, you’d be right. We have sixteen of them in the cargo bay.”
“So, the Terror has nukes, assuming this isn’t the first load siphoned off for him,” Brad said grimly. “This is getting more unpleasant by the moment.”
“What are your plans?” Falcone asked. “Do we call Fleet in now?”
He shook his head. “We don’t know if this is a wild goose chase. Also, the moment we call Fleet, the Terror will find out. He has them too deeply penetrated. We continue as planned.”
“One ship is not going to make much of a dent on the Cadre base,” Jason objected. “We don’t have that kind of firepower.”
“We do now,” Brad said, gesturing toward the nuclear torpedoes.
That produced a profound silence in the room.
“Using them is an act of treason, I think,” Shelly said.
“Not quite,” Falcone said, “but even I can’t give you permission. That kind of thing is way outside my already-extravagant authority.”
Brad smiled. “Think about the names of my ships. Heart of Vengeance and Oath of Vengeance. Do those leave the impression of someone who’ll allow the law to stop him from taking bloody revenge on those bastards?
“I’m more than happy to play by the rules so long as they don’t hamstring me. When I can use illegal means to end something like the Cadre, you bet your ass I’ll do that, too. Without a single regret, no matter how it ends up for me.”
He looked around the room at each of them. “Now is the point where you can choose to walk away. I won’t take anyone down with me who doesn’t choose to be there. If anyone wants out, we’ll make a side trip and drop them off. No harm, no foul. Clear?”
They looked at one another and made a show of leaning back in their seats.
“It looks as if we’re staying,” Falcone said. “Consequences be damned. The Cadre has to be stopped.”
“This might be the end of the Vikings,” he warned them. “It will certainly be the end of me being in charge of them. The Guild will have no choice but to expel me, and Fleet will clap me in irons. I’m hopeful they won’t go any further, but I can’t promise anything.”
He turned toward Falcone. “And I can’t order you at all. You’re as exposed as I am.”
She shrugged. “I was looking for a change of pace, anyway. It’s going to be a hard call for them. Acknowledge the destruction of the Cadre and then prosecute the people that ended them? That’s hardcore and may even be politically impossible.
“In any case,” she said with a grin, “I’m willing to roll the dice on this one. Let’s do it. Darkness, we might all die in the attempt and we’re worrying over nothing.”
“I had no idea you were such an optimist,” Saburo said dryly. “We’re all in for this, sir. If it means taking down the Terror and the Cadre, it’s worth it.”
“And rescuing Michelle!” Shelly added. “I’d do this for her even without the rest.”
Nods from everyone else confirmed he had his command crew.
“I still want everyone to have a chance to head back to our base,” he said. “There will be no dishonor if someone doesn’t want to go with us. None.”
“No one will abandon you,” Saburo said. “This is the moment we’ve all known was coming, even the new people. None will look away; mark my words.”
Brad turned to Randall. “What’s our overall status?”
“Seven of the gatlings are back up,” the engineer replied. “All of the torpedo tubes are functional. The nukes topped off our magazines. I have them loaded up front in Alpha. Drive Three is still down, so we can’t pull more than about two point eight mps squared, though.”
Brad looked around the table. “Assuming we find something at these coordinates, we’ll send word to Senator Barnes and Commodore Bailey, but we won’t be waiting for their response.
“This base is protected by secrecy. The Terror likely has only a few warships on station. Most of the defenses should be platform- or asteroid-based. We should be able to isolate those from outside their own range and blow them apart. That will clear the way for us to board the main installation.”
“Board?” Doary demanded. “Thirty of us against an unknown number of bad guys. Do we have any other surprises on our side?”
“We have two advantages,” Brad said. “Firstly, we’re there for two specific objectives. One team will rescue Michelle and any other prisoners near her while I kill the Terror. Once we make that happen, we get the fuck out.
“Secondly, I don’t care what we break. We go in loaded for bear and kill anything that moves. Shelly, set in a course for the transport’s rendezvous point. It’s time to end this.”
They found an old drone at the coordinates. It readily gave them a new destination once they gave it the right code: a spot in Neptune’s leading trojan cluster.
With Drive Three down, that was a week distant. He waited until they were almost there before sending the data to Bailey and Barnes. That meant there wouldn’t be any support, but no one would be able to betray their presence.
None of the asteroids clustered at the destination were large. The spherical zone of gravitational stability tended to catch and hold the things, but there had been few large asteroids this far out in the system to be caught.
There were nearly a hundred asteroids floating in a sphere about fifty thousand kilometers across. Most were small, less than a kilometer across, but a single larger rock, perhaps fifty kilometers in diameter, held a place of seeming pride at the center of the cluster.
That rock, according to Oath’s sensors, was the site of what appeared to be a small colony. Built off the side of the asteroid but likely linked to the “colony” by gantry-like passage tubes, was a refueling station.
Brad looked at the magnified image on the main viewscreen with grim wonder. For nearly four years, he’d hunted the Terror, and now he was here at the pirate’s lair. Vengeance was finally within his grasp.
“This is going to be fun,” Jason said, an odd tinge to his voice. “That place is fortified to the Dark and back again, sir.”
“Show me.”
The view of the base slowly moved out to encompass the whole cluster. An even dozen of the asteroids were now highlighted in red.
“These asteroids are the sites of ground-based sensors and presumably weapons. To take them out, we’ll need to literally reduce the asteroids to dust.”
Thirty glittering red dots appeared on the screen. “These, on the other hand, are satellite weapons platforms. Each of them masses around a thousand tons. A single standard torp will take them out, but e
ach of them would probably have half of our firepower if we were fully operational.”
Two red icons appeared, one linked to the fueling depot and one orbiting above the central asteroid.
“Last, but by no means least, there are two destroyers. One appears to be refueling, but the other is on guard. She’s stationary relative to the main base with her drives cold, but she’ll see us coming soon enough to come online and hold us in place while the rest of the defenses take us out.”
His executive officer might have once been his tactical officer, but that didn’t mean he was the end-all of tactical doctrine.
“You’re looking at their strengths. I agree, they’re tough. Yet they’re vulnerable in one very critical way: none of them can dodge.”
Jason froze for a long moment, then nodded slowly. “If we send the torps in ballistic—”
“They’ll never know what hit them,” Brad finished with satisfaction.
He tapped a code into his computers. “You now have complete access to the nuclear warheads and the pulsars in Epsilon magazine. I want you to set up a firing plan that drops a nuke on each of those asteroid platforms, at least two standard torps on each of the satellites, and two nukes on each of the destroyers.”
“If we nuke the destroyer at the refueling station, we’ll probably take that out, too,” Jason observed.
“So?” Brad asked with a cold smile. “I don’t care what we wreck. Blowing the fueling station will certainly distract them and so long as we don’t nuke the surface, the colony integrity shouldn’t be affected.”
Brad doubted any other ship in space could have done it. Even launching on ballistic trajectories, they couldn’t fire until they were almost on top of the base. They had to be able to see the targets very well to be sure the torpedoes had precisely the right courses.
Oath’s thermal baffling was designed for a Fleet cruiser. On their smaller hull, it occasionally blocked line of sight for some of the scanners, but it made Oath just about invisible when she wanted to be.
If a cruiser tried to slip up like this, her size would give her away. Oath was small enough to not be seen. Barely.