by Terry Mixon
At fifteen thousand kilometers, Oath was still nearly invisible. Inching along at less than half a kilometer per second with the baffling on full, she radiated too little to be detected on thermal scanners and moved too slowly to be picked up by visuals.
“They’re dialed in,” Jason said quietly as the ship continued to drift slowly in. “Firing pattern is ready.”
Brad regarded the red icons on the screen in front of him and then glanced down at the repeater, which marked the target designations for almost all of Oath’s torpedoes. If this worked, he wouldn’t need any more weapons. If it didn’t, Oath—and her crew—were dead.
“Fire,” he ordered softly.
Almost instantly, the first eight icons popped onto the screen and began to slowly fade out. Launching from the torpedo tubes gave them another four kilometers per second on top of Oath’s own speed, but that still put them nearly an hour from their targets. Nonetheless, the complete lack of drive power made them even more invisible than the destroyer.
Twenty seconds after the first salvo, the second fired. Slowly and evenly, every twenty seconds, another eight torpedoes entered space. The first salvos—all kinetics targeted on the satellite platforms—were away in just over three minutes.
Jason glanced up at Brad once they were. “Standing by to launch nuclear rounds.”
This was it. Everything up to now could be forgiven. Using nukes was going to cross the line between mercenary and vigilante.
Brad typed another code into his computers. “Complete nuclear release granted. Fire.”
Jason turned back to his console and launched two more salvos. “Firing pattern complete. We have two salvoes of regular torpedoes in reserve. I have pulsars mixed in with the regular torpedoes to blind the satellites. They won’t go off until the nukes detonate, since they aren’t set up to account for them.”
“Let’s hope we don’t need the last of our torpedoes,” Brad said solemnly. “Keep a close eye on the area. If anyone else shows up, we’ll have to deal them in.”
“You know I’ll support you to the hilt on this,” Falcone said from the seat she’d appropriated.
“I appreciate that,” he said with a lopsided smile. “I worry more about your future employment than what happens to me. You know what those monsters have done. They deserve what they’re getting and I’ll willingly pay the price for my revenge.”
When she said nothing, he returned his attention to the main screen. By now, the icons marking the locations of the first salvos were only projections—Oath couldn’t detect them any more than the Cadre could now.
“Time to impacts?” Brad asked quietly.
“Forty-eight minutes and counting,” Jason said.
Brad said nothing. There was nothing to say. He simply watched as the torpedoes made their slow but steady way toward the enemy.
As the time slipped by, he began to consider just how insane his attack plan was. There was enough firepower out there to make a squadron of cruisers turn back, and here he was thinking he could take them out with a single damaged destroyer?
It was impossible. They were all going to die because he was an arrogant fool.
Of course, the Cadre hadn’t picked up the torpedoes yet, but that didn’t mean anything. While the ones targeting the stationary platforms might make it through, but the ones against the destroyers didn’t have a hope if the attack was spotted. Darkness, any movement on the part of the destroyers would make them miss.
Even as his brain kept running in circles, the torpedo icons began lighting up, marking their drives coming online. It was too late to worry about failure now. He was committed.
The last torpedoes launched—the ones aimed at the destroyers—lit off first. Then, as those surged forward, they passed the torps locked onto the asteroid platforms, and those lit off. The cascade of glittering icons lighting up continued through the kinetics, until all the torpedoes were online.
Then, a bare handful of seconds after the last kinetic torp activated, those targeted on the destroyers hit their victims. For a moment, the screen flashed with the fury of nuclear fire. The flash expanded as the other nuclear torpedoes struck home, annihilating the asteroid stations.
Other icons flashed up on the screen, nearly obscured by the coronas of destruction expanding from the nuke strikes, marking the pulsars going off and blinding any remaining defenses. Seconds later, the last of the torpedoes took out the satellites.
“Everlit, yes!” Jason hissed as the flickering light encompassed the entire central portion of the cluster for a few moments. “Look at the bastards burn!”
Brad was silent, his thoughts grim as the light faded and the scanners began to trawl in their data. Jason flashed the visual of the main base up on the screen, just in time to catch the final side effects of the strike.
The refueling station, holes punched through it by the fiery lances of Oath’s torpedoes, was slowly falling under the impact and the slight influence of the planetoid’s gravity. As it fell, it became clear that there had been another ship attached to it, but Brad couldn’t make out any details in the visual.
The ship was clearly making a desperate effort to escape, its engines burning at maximum power, even burning parts of the station as it tried to run. For a moment, it seemed held by the girders of the station, but then it broke free.
Thankfully, it broke free moments too late.
Even as the girders snapped, an explosion began at the heart of the fuel tanks. The rippling burst of destruction, fueled by the massive quantities of both fuel and oxidizers stored in the tanks, surged outward from the station.
It caught the fleeing ship, broke it in half, and then threw the broken chunks out as a few more pieces of debris upon the wave front of the station’s destruction.
“Son of a bitch,” Brad said softly. By the time the explosion petered out, that entire side of the asteroid had been engulfed in its fury. Parts of the “colony” had been exposed, but most of the installation had been protected by the curvature of the asteroid and being underground. Michelle should be safe.
“If there were any weapons or sensors on the surface,” Jason responded quietly, “I don’t think we need to worry about them anymore. As for the pirates, they are going to be very distracted for a little while.”
Brad nodded, then glanced over to the pilot’s station. “Take us in, Shelly. Use the burned side of the asteroid as our shield. Tell Saburo we’ll launch the teams on schedule.”
Falcone stood. “Then I’d best go armor up. You, too. I hope your arm is up to the challenge.”
He did too. Dr. Duvall had done the best she could, but he wasn’t back up to his peak performance. That was still weeks away.
Well, he’d do the best he could. That’s all anyone could ask of a man.
“Right behind you,” he confirmed. “Jason, you have the conn. Go active on scanners and deal with any ships they throw at us. Good luck.”
Chapter Thirty
The landing bay they’d picked on the Cadre base—once they’d finally found one that looked remotely passable—had a half-melted look to it. The bay doors had been ripped off when the blast front had passed over the base, and it looked as if there’d been secondary explosions in the bay as well.
That made things difficult for Brad when he tried to find a place to put Oath’s first shuttle down. He was moments away from activating the bow guns and trying to clear a landing zone when Trista touched his shoulder.
“There,” she said quietly, pointing at the area near the entrance to the rest of the base. A chunk of the outer door had smashed its way through there, and while it had made a tortured mess of the wall behind the door, it had also swept the area in front of the entrance relatively clear of debris. Better yet, it had room for the second shuttle to land beside him.
Brad brought the shuttle forward with a flick of power. The planetoid’s gravity was negligible, and while the place clearly had gravity plates, they’d been disabled by the explosion. With a gentle tou
ch of counterthrust, he brought the shuttle to a stop about a meter above the bay’s floor.
With the landing legs fully extended, he brought the shuttle down with a gentle clunk. Brad checked to be sure they had full contact and then switched on their gravitic fields, locking the shuttle down. Saburo brought the second shuttle in beside his and landed just as neatly.
He tried to signal Oath that they had arrived, but received no response. The base had to be shielded. They wouldn’t get any warnings from their comrades overhead if there were trouble. Hopefully Jason and Shelly would recognize what the lack of coms meant—he couldn’t spare any of his ground team to take a shuttle back out to let them know.
“We’re go,” Brad said into his suit’s com. He and Trista joined the rest of his attack team in the back of the shuttle. Randall, Shelly, and Jason were holding the fort back aboard Oath, standing by to warn them if they detected Cadre warships approaching.
One of the troopers handed Brad a weapon as he reached the shuttle exit. The high-power automatic rifles his people sported were very much out of place in space combat, but Saburo believed in being prepared for everything.
They’d been purchased for the possibility of planetside combat, but they’d do equally well fighting through a station where one didn’t care how much damage one did. So long as they only fired at people with guns, the hostages should be relatively safe.
Brad checked the magazine on his rifle, turned the safety to the off position, and faced his strike team.
“Try to keep someone alive to tell us where the Terror is. We’ll leave rescuing Michelle to Saburo and Falcone. All right, folks. Let’s do this.”
The door sealing the landing bay from the rest of the complex was clearly intended to function as an airlock. Two sets of tracks were cut into the deck for the heavy doors.
A fragment of the outer doors had gouged its own trench into the floor, cutting both tracks, and had hit the inner door as well, bending it completely out of its tracks. The combination meant that not only were both doors open, they were exposed to vacuum.
Brad and Trista settled into overwatch positions as the troopers moved through. One of them stepped back into view and gave the all-clear sign.
The pair of officers followed through into one of the eeriest sights Brad had ever seen. Even past the debris from the landing bay, the corridor looked like hell. Power surges had blown out most of the lights, and the ones that still worked flickered intermittently.
Careful to allow each grav-boot to lock on before removing the other from the floor, Brad crossed to a small alcove in the wall. The computer was still operational, though its screen was flickering as badly as the lights. He brought up a map of the station, which carried a status warning on the various corridors on it.
“All right,” he said softly into the radio. “It looks as if most of the base has lost atmosphere. The deeper corridors have pressure but no power. This has one of those places marked as detention. Saburo, take Agent Falcone and rescue everyone there.”
“Yes, sir. Then we come for you.”
Brad shook his head. “Get them to safety. My story will be played out by that point. I’ll either be dead or victorious. Return to Oath as quickly as possible.”
His friend looked less than convinced but saluted. Brad half-doubted the man would follow that order, but he’d done what he could.
“The only major surface area with air and power is an atrium about four hundred meters north and two floors up. That’s the most likely place to find the Terror.”
A line of text flickered onto the screen, with a pattern marking itself as a repeating service message. “As if we needed the confirmation, the computer is telling all inhabitants to meet at the atrium to plan repairs and defense.”
Brad stepped out of the alcove, carefully covering the corridor with his rifle as he did. “No matter what happens, I’m proud of you. Good luck.”
They ran into trouble almost immediately. With the power toasted, the elevators were out of commission, and all the shafts they checked were blocked by elevators above their floor.
Stairs were the obvious next step, but there didn’t seem to be any. Not that they could easily see, anyway.
Ten minutes after they’d entered the base, Brad’s strike team found itself moving slowly down the corridor, opening every door they found, by brute force or otherwise, trying to find stairs.
Brad was trying yet another door when a single click came over the radio. He stopped and turned to see what had attracted his people’s attention. About twenty meters down the corridor from where his team was standing, a door was opening.
He dropped to one knee, bracing the rifle against his shoulder, and waited. A vac-suited man stepped through the door, followed by three others.
Vacuum doesn’t convey swearwords, but the first man scrabbling for his pistol certainly seemed to convey that feeling. Brad exhaled gently and pulled his trigger. A moment later, Trista and the troopers opened fire.
Brad’s first three-round burst slammed through the chest of the man who’d been drawing his pistol. By the time Brad tracked to another target, all of them were down.
His breathing was loud inside his helmet as he lunged to his feet, shuffling down the corridor as fast as his magnetized boots would allow.
Just as he reached the door, another man came out from behind it, a pistol in each vac-suited hand. Brad put a three-round burst clean through the man’s body and into the asteroid rock wall behind him.
One of the troopers caught up with him at the door and lunged ahead as Brad swapped magazines. He found the trooper grappling with two pirates above the bodies of three more seemingly cut down by point-blank automatic fire. One of the pirates was holding the trooper’s rifle while the other jerked free, his mono-blade swinging up.
A short burst of fire from Brad’s rifle took the man out before he could swing. A very slight shift of aim allowed Brad to put another burst through the remaining pirate’s faceplate.
Brad took a long breath and then glanced around. They were in a stairwell. Wide sets of stairs headed both up and down. He brought his rifle around to cover the way leading up.
A moment later, Trista and the other troopers joined them. He gave the hand signal for proceed and then gestured toward the stairs.
Trista and the troopers who’d come in with her settled into overwatch positions again. Brad nodded to them and then gestured the other trooper forward with him. They climbed the stairs and reached the next floor.
Brad surveyed the landing and checked farther up the stairs. He then stepped back to where Trista could see him and gestured all clear.
The second set of mercs moved up, past Brad and his trooper to the next landing. For a moment, they scanned the area around them, and then Trista gave Brad’s team the all clear.
The strike team reunited at the top of the stairs. Trista stepped over to the door leading to the floor, but Brad gestured for her to step over to him. Touching his helmet to hers, he could speak to her without using the radio.
“The atrium should be about a hundred meters to our right,” he said. “Take half the team and find a way around to the other side. When the fight goes down, I’ll be counting on you to protect me if he cheats. Also, if I lose, make sure he dies here.”
“You’ll win, sir,” she said confidently. “And no matter what, the Terror dies today.”
She opened the door and stepped out, half of the troopers following her. Their weapons swept the corridor and she gestured the all clear again.
Brad and his troopers joined them, their own weapons sweeping the corridor. He checked down to the right and saw, as expected, what appeared to be an airlock sealing the corridor about a hundred meters away.
He waited for Trista to find a cross corridor and lead her people away before he started toward the airlock. He was about ten meters away when it began sliding open.
Brad gestured for his people to take cover but not to fire. He stood alone in the center of the c
orridor as the airlock finished cycling.
A man in a vac-suit sporting a stylized screaming eagle on its shoulder stepped out of the lock and froze at the sight of Brad.
With a cold smile, Brad activated his suit’s com unit on all general frequencies. “My name is Brad Madrid and I’m here to complete my duel with the Terror. Take me to him.”
The pirate touched his wrist-comp, activating another channel. He must have left the general channel open as well, though, and Brad could hear his words.
“Sir, several of the intruders are outside the atrium. The leader claims right of combat. It’s Madrid.”
Silence reigned for a moment, and then a gravelly voice that Brad remembered only too well came out of the communicator. “Bring him to me. Only him and see that he’s disarmed.”
“I don’t think so,” Brad said, trusting that the Terror and—more importantly—the other pirates, could hear him. “I claim right of combat and am keeping my weapons. My people are too. You don’t exactly have a reputation for keeping your word, after all.”
He felt his lips widen into a cold smile. “You’re not afraid of the man that destroyed your base, are you? I have seven men with me. Are you so cowardly that you won’t finish our duel?”
“I’m no coward,” the Terror snarled. “Bring them in, but if anyone raises a weapon to interfere with our duel, my people will cut them down.”
“And if your people try to cheat, my men will cut them down. I believe we understand the rules. I can’t tell you how much I’ve been looking forward to ending this. And you.”
“Dream on, mercenary. In just a few minutes, you’ll be dead. Come meet your master, fool.”
The pirate ahead of him gestured toward the airlock. Brad called his people forward, and they all entered the lock.
When it finished cycling, Brad stepped through the inner door and into the atrium. The gravity inside was active but only set to about half of lunar standard. A twelfth of normal gravity. That would make things interesting.