Reconnaissance in Force (Book 6 of The Empire of Bones Saga)

by Terry Mixon

  “Aye, sir.”

  He could see the battle forming up at the hostile flip point, but only through the gravitic scanners. It would take a while longer to see the specifics of what was happening out there. Probably long after the fight was over.

  “The collier has made the flip to Pentagar,” Marcus said. “Perhaps once we have more force in the system, that will convince the enemy to surrender.”

  “I hope so, but I wouldn’t hold my hypothetical breath if I were you. A single destroyer wasn’t dissuaded when we chased it down with a battlecruiser, and the sight of a superdreadnought coming their way isn’t deterring these boys.

  “I’m also afraid that trying to intimidate them over the com would backfire. They don’t respond well to us. That programming in their officers’ implants makes them go all violent. That might be counterproductive.”

  “I submit that that might work in our favor,” the AI said. “If they are driven to attack, then we can be certain that no stragglers become lost in the system.

  “By now, they are aware of the battle taking place at the flip point they came through. I have no doubt it will be resolved in our favor, though probably at heavy cost. They will not try to fight their way back through.”

  Jared shared the AI’s opinion about the likely cost of the battle, but wasn’t sure he followed the rest of his logic.

  “Are you saying they’ll go suicidal? I’m not sure this is that simple.”

  “Perhaps suicidal is the wrong word, Admiral. I think they will try to take us out, but I have no absolute proof that is true. What I am relatively confident of is the fact that they will likely not try to escape.”

  He considered what Marcus was saying and shrugged. “There’s only one way to find out. Record an outgoing message.”

  Jared faced the main screen resolutely. “This is Admiral Jared Mertz. We have you outgunned and in a poor tactical position. My superdreadnought has more than enough firepower to take out your entire force. I call on you to spare your crews death and surrender.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Zia watched the brawl just inside missile range with a mixture of awe and dread. The fighters had obliterated all six light cruisers, but they’d taken heavy losses. Five pilots had ejected from crippled fighters and thirteen others were gone, their pilots almost certainly dead.

  Annette was rearming now and would rejoin the fight in a minute. Unless Zia ended it first.

  Her tactical officer turned toward her. “We’re inside the designated firing range.”

  “Fire,” Zia said coldly.

  Audacious and her escorts billowed missiles toward the light war craft. The carrier had fewer missiles than a superdreadnought, but far more than even a heavy cruiser could boast. In a standup duel, the destroyers would lose.

  The enemy returned fire, streaming almost as many missiles back toward her. That’s when they found out another ugly truth.

  Fighters could shoot down missiles with their flechettes. Almost half of their salvo never made it past the swarm of little ships around the destroyers.

  With their attention split between the fighters and the incoming missiles, their defenses were far weaker than they’d probably expected.

  Explosions lit up the space around them. When the scanner readings cleared, they’d blown up or disabled all but six destroyers. This fight was almost over.

  “Incoming signal from the hostile ships,” the com officer said. “They’re surrendering.”

  “Pull the fighters back,” she ordered. “Cease fire, but maintain targeting locks.”

  The fighters disentangled themselves from the remaining enemy ships. Some headed back to Audacious for rearming, but the rest kept the surviving destroyers under their guns.

  “They’ve dropped their battle screens,” the tactical officer said. “I still have the officer on the com.”

  “Put them on the screen,” Zia said.

  A smoke-filled bridge appeared on the main screen. The woman in the command chair had a long gash down her cheek and had a number of black smudges on her face. She looked furious. In her place, Zia couldn’t blame her.

  “I am Commander Veronica Giguere, commanding officer of the Imperial Fleet destroyer R-7322. We surrender. I don’t know what the fuck you bastards are playing at, but we surrender.”

  Zia nodded. This had to be hard for the woman. She knew it would be if the situation were reversed. Now she just needed to handle this without triggering the buried programming in the woman’s corrupted implant code. She wanted live prisoners, not a ravening fight to the death.

  “We accept your surrender, Commander. You’ve done the smart thing, even if it doesn’t feel that way right now.

  “Keep your screens down and idle your fusion plants. No targeting scanners, either. No destruction of your systems or booby-traps. My prize crews will meet any resistance with lethal force, and that won’t change your situation one bit.

  “You made the right call. Now don’t screw it up. Gather all your crew in the mess areas. No weapons. Not even a folding knife. We’ll process you all as quickly as we can and get you safely removed to our ships.”

  The other woman shook her head slowly. “This is treason. You’ll hang for this.”

  Zia smiled a little wryly. “Don’t think you know everything that’s going on in the Empire, Commander. Let’s just say that not all our leadership has been read in on every operation. Unfortunately, you stumbled into something you aren’t cleared for.”

  An outright lie, but one that would hopefully keep her thinking Zia and her people were part of the Rebel Empire fleet.

  “I have no idea what the hell you’re talking about,” Commander Giguere assured her. “We will follow your instructions, but rest assured there will be hell to pay over this. I don’t care what faction you represent, the Lords will quash you like a bug. R-7322 out.”

  The screen cleared, reverting to a view of space.

  Zia opened a channel to operations. Brandon Levy appeared.

  “Yes, Captain?”

  “The enemy in our area has surrendered. I want you to organize prize crews to take control of the ships. All the prisoners come to Audacious and you’ll keep enough people over there to move the ships, if we need to.

  “I’ve instructed them not to destroy systems or set booby-traps, but we can’t assume that’s the case. At the very least, I expect they’ll purge the computer systems. I would. You’ll have to be thorough, but don’t give them any reason to suspect who we are. Keep conversations down to instructions, don’t give names of ships, and stomp on any resistance.”

  He nodded. “I’ll get right on it, ma’am. What about the rest of the system? Are the other ships still actively hostile?”

  “It looks that way. We’ll find out soon enough. If Admiral Mertz can’t handle the rest of the hostiles, we’ll come in and help.”

  “I get it now,” he said softly. “I understand why this ship revolves around the fighters. They really turned this fight around.”

  She just wished it hadn’t cost so many of them their lives. “You had no way of knowing. Now you do. Welcome to the club. CSAR will recover the pilots who ejected, and then we’ll have to help them put themselves back together again. Losing friends is never easy.”

  * * * * *

  Kelsey arrived in the cargo bay and took stock of what it held. There were a number of cargo containers. Her implants could read the manifests easily enough. If they were accurate, this hold held enough Raider implants to upgrade about a thousand people.

  More than they had with them, but far less than she’d hoped to get.

  The rest of the crates held sundry other high-tech replacement gear. Mostly things they already had in large measure.

  Being the untrusting sort, she opened a few crates to verify their contents. The ones labeled communications gear were a surprise. They contained all the parts to construct an AI.

  That made sense. They’d obviously intended to obliterate the computer and put
a real AI in command.

  The find put her in a quandary. They had enough space in the pinnaces to take the Raider implants or the AI. Not both.

  “Dammit,” she said under her breath. “Get the crates labeled as communications gear onto the pinnaces.”

  The corporal frowned. “I don’t understand. Aren’t we here for the Raider gear?”

  “Yes, but these crates have a disassembled AI. That trumps the Raider implants. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but we’re going to have to leave the implants.”

  “Maybe not,” a man said from the entrance to the hold. It was one of the recovery people. Tom Stoecklein. The tall man was looking over the crates with what seemed like a knowledgeable eye.

  “You have my full and undivided attention, Mister Stoecklein. How can I have my cake and eat it, too?”

  “This ship has a number of cargo shuttles. Not stealthy at all, under the best of circumstances, but perhaps useful. I suggest you load the rest of the cargo onto them and eject the shuttles. Don’t even power them on. Let them coast along our current trajectory while we change course.”

  Kelsey thought about that and slowly nodded. “It’s possible that a ship that chases us down might miss the shuttles, or assume they have the crew on board. It’s better than no chance, I suppose. Thanks.”

  She turned to the corporal. “What’s in the other holds?”

  “They’re empty, ma’am. It looks as though they only brought enough actual cargo to look good in a spot inspection. I’m surprised they put the AI in the same hold, though. What if the customs people looked inside?”

  Kelsey shook her head. “You’ve never met the Pale Ones. Attention to detail is not their strong suit. Get all this gear loaded and prepare to eject all the small craft. The pinnaces can stick with the cargo shuttles until it becomes apparent there’s going to be direct pursuit.

  “See that the prisoners are on the pinnaces, along with all non-essential personnel. Lieutenant Paulson will make sure there is space for everyone.”

  She checked the scanner readings through her implants. The incoming hostile force was still angling to meet Invincible, but a destroyer was edging their way. Not far enough to actually come meet them, but perhaps to launch pinnaces. The marine boats would be able board the freighter. Or destroy it.

  Kelsey had no idea how they expected to get out of the system. Perhaps their scanner readings from the area around the flip point were showing something different than she saw. Perhaps their other ships had beaten Zia.

  That would be a disaster, so she prayed it wasn’t so.

  That’s when she noticed the destroyer changing course to meet them and accelerating. So, no pinnaces. That probably meant Zia had just handed them their asses.

  “We have less than half an hour to get everything loaded,” she said. “Get moving!”

  That was going to be very, very tight, and she wasn’t done with her scavenging yet.

  Kelsey raced back to the computer compartment. She didn’t pretend to have anything like Carl’s knowledge of these things, but she did know where the cores were. If there was useful data for them to find, she needed those cores.

  In her armor, she had no trouble lifting the heavy pods out of their cradles, once she’d opened the wall shielding them up. The computer followed its programming and shut down.

  “Colonel, this is Cain Hopwood. The computer just went offline.”

  “That’s me,” she said as she hefted the first one and carried it out into the corridor. “We’re evacuating and I want to take the cores with us.”

  “Copy that. What should my people do?”

  She made her way to the lift at the end of the corridor and set the core down before heading back to get the second one. “Coordinate with Lieutenant Paulson. Get the cargo and people loaded up.”

  “Roger that. Hopwood out.”

  The loading of the cargo shuttles was well under way when she arrived. A quick eyeball told her there was enough room for the Raider implant containers, but not the computer cores. It was a tight fit with just the implant hardware.

  Hmmm. She was going to need to be creative.

  Ten minutes later, they’d loaded the cargo shuttles. As expected, there was no room to spare. They’d had to strap a few containers outside the hulls of the small craft to get everything. Two of the marines volunteered to pilot the shuttles, but she sent them back to the pinnaces. She wasn’t risking her people on this wild chance.

  A check of the shuttles’ control interfaces told her that the standard Rebel Empire had installed implant overrides. Since no one on a regular freighter would have implants, that was simply covering their bases.

  Using the knowledge she’d picked up from Carl, it only took a minute to get the devices to pop up the override codes for her. She changed them to something she would remember. It was always best to make sure the enemy couldn’t use their surprises.

  Paulson stepped up beside Kelsey. “We’ve got the containers and prisoners loaded onto the pinnaces. We’re ready to eject these and scram.”

  Kelsey nodded. “Excellent. How are were doing for space?”

  “Packed to the bulkheads. The pinnaces were never designed to carry cargo like that. We’ll all fit, though.”

  “Send me the load details,” she said as she strapped the computer cores to the cargo shuttles. She’d put one on each. That increased the odds that at least one of the redundant units would make it.

  The data appeared in her implant interface. Both pinnaces were heavily overloaded. This was risking a lot.

  “I’ll ride on the other pinnace,” she told the marine officer. “It has a tad more space left. Go load up and be ready to depart on my order.”

  Paulson nodded. “Copy that.”

  She watched the marine head off. The woman was going to be seriously displeased with her once this was over.

  Kelsey contacted the pilot on the other pinnace. “Once you have the last of your assigned people on board, be ready to separate. I originally told the LT that I was going with you, but I think I’ll go with her instead. Don’t wait for me.”

  “Copy that, ma’am,” the man said.

  Once no one was looking at her, Kelsey climbed into one of the cargo shuttles and strapped into the pilot’s chair.

  “Does everyone have their assigned people aboard?” she asked over her armor com.

  When both replied they were ready, she continued. “I’m remotely jettisoning the cargo shuttles. Once they clear the freighter, you can detach from the hull and move off under stealth.”

  That’s when she saw Tom Stoecklein climbing into the other shuttle. How had he slipped away from the pinnaces? Probably the same way she had. Better yet, how had he known what she was up to?

  She opened a low power implant connection to the man.

  What the hell are you doing?

  I could ask you the same thing, but I figure I already know the answer. I probably shouldn’t let the heir wander off all by herself.

  Kelsey shook her head. This is going to be dangerous.

  As if the rest of this isn’t. I was up on the bridge, programming a few automatic responses into the controls that might help fool the destroyer. Once I saw you were still aboard, I decided to come along for the ride. Aren’t we wasting time?

  Don’t think you’ve heard the last of this. Jettison in three…two…one…mark!

  She hit the control and the cargo shuttle unclamped from its recessed area. The doors under it slid open and allowed the shuttle to drift away from the freighter. She’s already programmed them to close once she was clear. That would keep the enemy in the dark about their departure.

  The other shuttle drifted clear of the freighter and the hatches closed on schedule. The freighter began pulling away from them quickly. It wasn’t accelerating that fast when compared to other ships, but the shuttles were unpowered.

  Kelsey couldn’t see the pinnaces departing, but she knew they’d be leaving the hull about now. They’d accelerate slo
wly in different directions, keeping her people safe from the enemy.

  Now all she had to do was hope the destroyer didn’t spot the shuttles. The freighter would change course in a minute. That would hopefully keep them out of the detection range of the Rebel Empire warship.

  Chapter Twenty

  Brandon made his way down to the landing bay. His crew in operations would keep a close eye on the enemy ships, but they’d caught them. All he had to do now was get their crews onto Audacious without setting off their buried attack programming.

  Annette Vitter was standing there, still in her flight suit. She turned toward him when he approached. Her face was drawn.

  “I’m sorry about your people,” he said. “They saved a lot of us on the ships, and they really showed everyone what fighters could do.”

  “Thank you. It’s just hard to appreciate that right now when I’ve lost so many of them.”

  He already knew the numbers. The enemy had destroyed eighteen of the agile little craft. Two thirds of a squadron.

  Most had gone completely silent, but a few pilots had ejected. That was no doubt why she was here, waiting for word on those who might still be alive.

  “We lost at least thirteen people,” she said. “I’m hopeful that five others are still alive, but that hurts on a personal level. I’ve lived and worked with these people. It’s like losing family.”

  “I wish there was anything I could do to make it better.”

  She sighed. “We’ll mourn them and get past it. We don’t have a choice. Next time it might be worse. Fighter pilots burn bright and die quickly.” The last sounded more than a bit bitter.

  He put an arm around her shoulder. It was highly unprofessional, but felt right. “We’re all here for you.”

  Annette nodded, tears in her eyes. “That makes a difference. It really does.”

  A low hooting announced an incoming ship. Moments later, a CSAR shuttle came streaking in at high speed, only coming to an abrupt stop when the arrestor field snatched the small craft to an abrupt halt.