by David Weber
“Yes, Ma’am,” Travis confirmed. “And they’re not going to get the nodes retuned, either. Not anytime soon.”
“What about the reactor?” Calkin asked. “It has molycircs, too.”
“Yes, Sir, but all of them are deeper in toward the center of the hull,” Travis said, pulling up a different page. “The gravity transient shouldn’t get close enough to affect them.”
“Besides, even if it does, it’ll just shut everything down in a controlled scram,” Metzger said, reaching over Travis’s shoulder to the intercom. “Exactly what it’ll do to the nodes, in fact. Weapons; bridge. Donnelly?”
“Donnelly, aye,” Donnelly’s voice came back instantly.
“Get back to your board,” Metzger ordered. “I need a fast reprogramming.”
* * *
“Missile away!” Mota’s voice boomed from the bridge speaker. “From Guardian—damn it all, they’re firing!”
Guzarwan snapped his head around to the tactical display, feeling his tongue freeze to the roof of his mouth. No—it was impossible. The Manticorans, firing on a Havenite ship? That was an act of war.
But the missile was there. It was there, damn it—a blur on the tactical as its thirty-five-hundred-gee acceleration ate up the thousands of kilometers separating the two ships. Guzarwan had one final glimpse of the missile as it bore down on Péridot’s stern—
And then, nothing.
Guzarwan stared at the tactical, a sense of utter disbelief swirling through his mind. According to the track, the missile had shot out from Guardian, angled the last few degrees to line up on Péridot, and continued straight on toward its target.
And after all of that effort, the Manticorans had missed.
They’d missed.
It was impossible. But it was true. The track plainly showed the missile running parallel to the portside flank, a good ten kilometers out, then heading off toward the eternity of the universe.
They’d missed.
No one out here was supposed to have much experience with real warfare, Guzarwan knew. Even Haven, who’d tackled pirates and the occasional lunatic interstellar nomad group, was barely above amateur status. But this was just ridiculous. Even if the missile itself didn’t zero in, Guardian should at least have been able to get it close enough to its target for its stress bands to do some damage. But they hadn’t even managed that.
Could Péridot have some automatic ECM running that had confused or disabled the missile? Mota hadn’t been able to tap into any of the weapons or active defenses, but it was possible the Havenites routinely left some of their passive defense systems running on general principles. Guzarwan hadn’t spotted any evidence of such a setup on the status monitors, but it was the only thing that even halfway made any sense.
And if that was indeed the case, then he and Vachali were even more home free than he’d thought. If none of the Manticoran missiles could touch them, Péridot and Saintonge could not only bring up their wedges at their leisure, but they could also cut their mowing-machine swath through the other orbiting ships with impunity. Guardian would be the first, of course, lest one of his new ships accidently strayed within laser range—
“Chief!” Thal’s frantic voice came from the speaker. “The wedge has collapsed!”
Guzarwan’s heart skipped a beat.
“What the hell are you talking about?” he demanded.
“It’s collapsed,” Thal repeated. “The whole system—both impeller rings—they’ve shut down. We’re trying to restart, but—God, the diagnostics have gone crazy.”
And in a horrible, suffocating instant, Guzarwan understood.
The Manticoran missile hadn’t missed at all. It had done exactly what it was intended to do.
Somehow, that close pass had scrambled the impeller rings. Scrambled them badly enough to shut down, and to take the half-formed wedge with them.
And now, far from being immune to Guardian’s weapons, Péridot stood utterly open and defenseless against them.
Thal was still blabbering about tuning and synchronization and molycircs, his voice joined now by a chorus of frantic reports coming from other parts of the ship. But Guzarwan wasn’t listening. There was a way out of this, he knew. There was always a way out. He wasn’t going to give up, not now. Not after the Manticorans had so clearly demonstrated their reluctance to destroy Havenite property and lives. Not when he had two ships’ worth of hostages to bargain with.
Certainly not with the ultimate hole card, Wanderer and its missile, still unsuspected up his sleeve.
“Everyone shut up,” he called toward the mike. “Shut up.”
The cacophony trailed away. “All right,” he said into the tense silence. “Everyone shut up and listen. Here’s what we’re going to do…”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Gill had just finished unfastening his section of ceiling when something seemed to zoom by.
An instant later, he realized how absurd that sounded. He was floating in zero-gee, in the middle of a tangle of pipes and conduits that pretty well precluded the possibility of anything moving quickly, let alone moving so fast that he hadn’t seen it.
But yet the sense remained.
Frowning, he looked around. Nothing seemed to have changed. He leaned out from the air-exchange box that was blocking his view of Flanders.
To find that the other was looking around, too. In the gloom of the accessway Gill couldn’t make out Flanders’s expression through his faceplate, but he had the sense from the other’s posture that he was feeling the same confusion.
The commodore spotted Gill looking at him, and for a moment they gazed across the cramped space at each other. Then, motioning Gill to stay put, Flanders worked his way through the equipment to his side. He touched his helmet to Gill’s— “I just had the strangest feeling,” the Havenite’s faint voice came. “Like a mini-groundquake. I know that’s ridiculous, but…” He lifted a hand helplessly.
“Not really,” Gill assured him. “Only to me it felt like something shot past.”
“Weird,” Flanders said. “After forty years in the Navy, I thought I knew every twitch or grunt a ship could make. But that was a new one. What the hell are they doing down there?”
Gill looked at the status display at the inside edge of his faceplate, freshly aware of the red glow that marked the silenced com. But if the reactor crew was in vac suits, and couldn’t easily use the hard-wired intercoms… “Let’s find out,” he suggested, pointing to the com control.
Flanders nodded and reached for his own control. Twisting his face so that he wouldn’t even be breathing toward his mike, Gill turned on his com and ran slowly through the frequency presets. He reached the fifth one—
“—to Shuttle Port One,” Guzarwan’s harsh voice came. “Stay in good retreat formation—remember there are still at least two Havenites running around loose, plus probably a few more gone to ground elsewhere.”
“Never mind the Havenites,” someone bit out. “What about the damn Manticorans? If they decide to blow us out of the sky—”
“If they wanted to blow us out of the sky, they’d have done that instead of just wrecking our impellers,” Guzarwan bit out. “Stop yapping and get your butts to the shuttle.”
Flanders tapped Gill’s arm and tapped his com switch. Gill nodded and shut his off, as well, then touched his helmet to Flanders’s. “Any ideas?” he asked.
“About what Guardian did just now? Or about what we should do next?”
“Either or,” Gill said. “I’d go with the second question, because frankly I haven’t a clue as to how they scrambled Péridot’s nodes without gutting us like a fish. But somehow, they managed it.”
“With the happy result that the rats are pulling out,” Flanders said with grim satisfaction. “And once they’re gone, the ship is ours. You know how to assemble an emergency micro airlock, right?”
“I’ve knocked together a few in my day,” Gill confirmed. “But I don’t know the first thing about disarm
ing bombs.”
“You won’t need to,” Flanders said. “We use the airlocks to reseal the outer hull hatches they blew, then repressurize the amidships section.”
“But the hatches to the spin sections are still booby-trapped. How do we clear them?”
“Again, we don’t have to,” Flanders said. “Once the area is repressurized the bombs are welcome to blow through the viewports. Hell, they can disintegrate the entire hatch if they want. As long as everyone inside is out of the blast range, I don’t care.”
“So we just stand off and throw bricks at them or something until they go off?”
“Something like that.” Flanders’s face settled into hard lines. “And once we’ve got Péridot back…well, we’ll see what our options are.”
Gill felt something hard settle into his stomach. There was a simmering death in Flanders’s eyes that Gill hadn’t seen there before. It was just as well, he thought soberly, that that death wasn’t aimed at him and his people. “Sounds good,” he said. “Let’s do it.”
* * *
It worked. To Travis’s mild surprise and infinite relief, the plan actually worked.
Kountouriote’s gravitics sensors confirmed Péridot’s wedge had collapsed. Carlyle’s infrared sensors further confirmed a dip in the cruiser’s heat that suggested the reactor’s systems had taken a mild hit as well before the automatics restabilized the power levels.
And as the quiet and cautious triumph rippled across Guardian’s bridge, Travis felt a warm glow of satisfaction filling him.
The glow lasted exactly forty-five seconds before the com board he was still strapped to went crazy.
The first furious and frantic calls came from the Havenite courier ships in distant orbit, their watch officers demanding to know who the hell was throwing missiles and who the hell they were throwing those missiles at. Travis was still fumbling with the unfamiliar controls when Secour’s ground command chimed in, a surprisingly calm General Chu acknowledging the event, though pointedly asking if this was what Manticorans considered keeping an ally informed.
Fortunately, before Travis could even begin to figure out what to say or do, someone he hadn’t even seen enter the bridge nudged his hands aside and keyed everything over to the Tactical station, where Calkin had settled in and was starting in on the explanations.
Travis wished him luck with that one.
A minute later the newcomer had helped Travis out of his straps and taken his place at Com. “Over here, Long,” Metzger said, beckoning.
Travis pushed himself to her side. “Yes, Ma’am?”
“Well done, Petty Officer,” she said, peering at her displays. “Now for Saintonge. Any thoughts?”
Travis frowned. “I thought you were sending Colonel Massingill to deal with them.”
“Sent, past tense,” Metzger corrected. “Massingill’s shuttle left about a minute ago.”
“Oh,” Travis said, frowning at the tactical. He hadn’t even noticed that one go by.
The shuttle was there, all right, arrowing toward Saintonge’s bow endcap. So far, the battlecruiser wasn’t showing any response.
“I’m mostly wondering if you’ve got any other thoughts on taking out impeller rings,” Metzger continued. “We’re not exactly in position to try the same trick again.”
“No, Ma’am,” Travis agreed. Missiles had a certain level of maneuverability, but it was only a few degrees at the most.
And of course, turning Guardian’s bow to Péridot had left her stern pointed toward Saintonge. Battlecruisers like Vanguard had aft lasers back there to use against enemy ships. Elderly destroyers like Guardian didn’t have so much as an autocannon.
And they certainly couldn’t get away with the same slow yaw rotation that had gotten Guardian lined up for the shot on Péridot. Not now. Saintonge would be watching them like a giant hawk. “I’m afraid I don’t have any other ideas, Ma’am,” he admitted. “I don’t know the standard tactical responses in this situation.”
Metzger snorted. “The standard tactical response in this situation is to not get in this situation,” she said. “If you’re already there, you roll wedge or else use your laser or missiles to beat the crap out of the enemy before he does it to you. Here and now, we’re not in a position to do either.”
“Except as a last resort.”
“Except as a last resort,” Metzger said grimly. “And if we don’t, General Chu will. He will, and he should.”
“I understand,” Travis murmured. “I’m sorry, Ma’am.”
“Never mind sorry,” Metzger countered. “My point is that unless the Saintonge hijackers have been sloppy at their job, Massingill is unlikely to find any useable allies over there. If the rest of the Havenites are dead or contained, she won’t be able to do more than buy us a little time. It’s up to us to find a more permanent solution.”
“A solution that doesn’t involve destroying the ship,” Travis said. “Understood, Ma’am.”
“Commander, we’re getting a signal from one of Péridot’s shuttles,” Com spoke up. “Correction: it’s one of the ones Saintonge sent over there earlier today. Audio only, on laser carrier.”
“Wants to keep this private, I see,” Metzger muttered. She hunched her shoulders briefly and keyed her board. “Péridot shuttle, this is Commander Metzger, Executive Officer of HMS Guardian. I assume that’s you, Guzarwan?”
“It is indeed, Commander,” a familiar voice answered. “Congratulations on your splendid maneuver a few minutes ago. My technical people still don’t know exactly what you did, but it was most effective.”
“We’re glad you liked it,” Metzger said. “We’ll be using it on Saintonge next. You might want to warn your people there.”
“Already done so,” Guzarwan said. “But I’d recommend not trying it a second time. Not unless you want to risk a war with Haven.”
Metzger’s eyes flicked to Travis. “On the contrary, I think Haven would thank us for keeping their warships out of enemy hands.”
“They might,” Guzarwan said. “If you had any proof that Saintonge was, in fact, in such hands at the time of your attack. I doubt you could muster anything that would satisfy them. Certainly not the more aggressive faction of the RHN. I presume you’re familiar with the truism that an unused military either fades away or finds a reason to go to war?”
Metzger’s lips compressed briefly. She did have such proof, Travis knew. More than that, she had Commodore Flanders’s explicit order to destroy both Saintonge and Péridot if necessary.
But that was apparently something she wasn’t yet prepared to share with the enemy.
“What do you want, Guzarwan?” she asked instead.
“I called to explain the new reality.” The banter was gone from Guzarwan’s voice now, with only coldness remaining. “Thanks to you, Péridot is no longer of any use to us. My men and I have therefore boarded a shuttle and will soon be joining our friends aboard Saintonge.”
“Traveling along our line of fire?” Metzger asked pointedly. “What makes you think you’ll reach your destination?”
“For starters, my men have control of Saintonge,” Guzarwan said. “Along with the ship herself, we have a great many Havenite hostages whom we weren’t planning to kill but whom we also don’t especially need alive. I doubt you’d enjoy watching us execute them one by one in full video view of the other ships and the entire population of Secour.”
“They’re military men and women,” Metzger said, her voice steady. “They’re prepared to die for their nation.”
“Of course they are,” Guzarwan said. “But Ambassador Boulanger may not be so sanguine about giving his life for the Republic. Are you, Ambassador?”
“Don’t flatter yourself, Guzarwan,” a new voice said calmly. “A diplomatic post carries the same risks as a military one.”
“Perhaps,” Guzarwan said. “Still, I doubt Commander Metzger would want Guardian to be the instrument of your death. And she certainly wouldn’t wish to be the instr
ument of her own captain’s death.”
Someone behind Travis snarled a quiet curse. Metzger’s expression didn’t even twitch. “You really think I’d hesitate over one life in the midst of a battle?”
“I’m sure you wouldn’t,” Guzarwan agreed. “But that’s not really the situation, is it? Your ship’s not in any danger, I have your captain and a Havenite ambassador, and you really can’t justify killing them when there are other, less violent options for stopping me.”
“Really?” Metzger asked. “What options are those?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Guzarwan said. “But I know you won’t give up looking for them until we raise Saintonge’s wedge and head for the hyper limit. Perhaps not even then.”
“You’re absolutely correct on that point,” Metzger said. “So let me offer you a deal. If you surrender your hostages and abandon Saintonge, I’ll give you safe passage to your own ship and allow you to leave Secour unhindered.”
“Please, Commander,” Guzarwan chided. “We’ve put in far too much effort to simply walk away. Especially when we still have the upper hand.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“You aren’t?” Guzarwan countered. “Fine—here’s my counter-offer. Since you’ve already cost us one warship, give us the other and we’ll call it a draw. As a good-faith gesture, we’ll leave Captain Eigen and Ambassador Boulanger aboard this shuttle when we disembark. As soon as they can cycle the flight systems back around, they’ll be free to leave and join you aboard Guardian.”
“Very generous of you,” Metzger said. “And the rest of Saintonge’s crew?”
“They’ll be put into escape pods and sent out as soon as we’re ready to leave orbit.”
“And you’d let them go? Just like that?”
“Just like that,” Guzarwan assured her. “Of course, some of those pods will be on tight intersect courses with the atmosphere, so you’ll have to make a choice between rescuing them or chasing us. But I’m sure you’ll make the right decision.”
“Guzarwan—”
“I have to go now, Commander,” Guzarwan cut her off. “I’ll speak to you again once we’re aboard Saintonge. Oh, and I presume I don’t have to tell you that trying to tractor us in to Guardian will be the same as opening fire on us. Ambassador Boulanger and Captain Eigen will be the first to be executed, with the crews of the two Havenite ships next in line. I’m sure you’d enjoy the temporary promotion to captain, but I doubt such an incident would do much for your long-term career advancement. Until later, Commander.”