Manticore Ascendant 1: A Call to Duty (eARC)

by David Weber

  There was a click, and Travis looked at the board to see that the shuttle’s carrier laser had winked off. “Here they come, Ma’am,” Carlyle’s voice came from the speaker. “Shuttle leaving Péridot and bearing our direction. Moving at full speed.”

  “I see them,” Metzger said. “Drew, did you get everyone out there calmed down?”

  “More or less,” the TO said. “No one’s happy, but none of the other ships is in any position to do more than just yell right now.”

  “What about Chu?”

  “He says that if we plan to fire any more missiles we’re to damn well inform him of that fact beforehand. Aside from that, I get the impression he’s rather impressed by our ingenuity.” Calkin flicked the backs of his fingertips across Travis’s shoulder. “I told him ingenuity was just SOP for the RMN. Anything from Colonel Massingill?”

  “They’re nearly there,” Metzger said, leaning closer to her displays. “What’s happening to Saintonge?”

  “I don’t know,” Calkin said, frowning. “Carlyle?”

  “She’s…jittering, Sir,” Carlyle said, sounding confused. “Running her thrusters…it seems like almost at random.”

  “It is,” Metzger said sourly. “They’ve spotted Massingill’s shuttle and are trying to keep it from docking.”

  “Massingill will figure something out.” Calkin waved at the display. “Meanwhile, Guzarwan and his hostages are ten minutes out from Saintonge. We need to decide what we’re going to do with them.”

  * * *

  “Okay, we’re doing it,” Vachali’s grouchy voice came over the shuttle speaker. “But bouncing everyone around like this is going to play hell with our containment.”

  “Why, are you getting bounced around more than the Havenites?” Guzarwan scoffed. “They’re the ones trying to move. You’re in fixed positions.”

  “Fixed like we’re riding a hurricane,” Vachali countered. “I thought these grav plates were supposed to dampen out jitters like this.”

  “I guess they don’t. Or else you just don’t know how to sweet-talk them.”

  “Yeah, right,” Vachali growled. “Come on, Chief, this is ridiculous. I say let ’em aboard and have at it. Bouncing around like this won’t stop them forever.”

  “I’m not interested in stopping them,” Guzarwan said, getting a hard grip on his temper. Vachali was a good fighter, but a lousy strategist. “Not right away, anyhow. We want Metzger dithering around until the last minute, hoping she can find a way to pull this out of the fire. If we let the shuttle dock and play Capture The Hill, it’ll be over way too fast. Better to let them pop in through a bunch of different hatchways—probably the same ones you froze the sensors on—and go out in their own private blazes of glory. Not knowing what’s happening will slow Metzger down, make her think she’s still got a chance. Right now, that’s what we want.”

  “If you say so,” Vachali grumbled. “I’d still rather have ’em all in a bunch.”

  “It won’t matter,” Guzarwan said patiently, stifling the urge to roll his eyes. “This is the Manticoran Navy, remember? They’re not going to have more than three or four Marines aboard. Probably not even that many. You’ve got fixed positions, and you’ll be dealing with a few professionals plus a few more amateurs. Trust me—it’ll be a duck shoot.”

  “Yeah. I suppose.”

  “More to the point, if they dock their shuttle will be attached to the hull,” Guzarwan went on. “If, instead, they have to go in through the hatches, they’ll probably have the pilot hang around, just drifting…and with your thrusters already moving you around, he won’t even notice when you maneuver him into range of one of your com lasers and fry their transmitters.”

  “Ah,” Vachali said, understanding finally coming. “And since their suit coms will be relayed through the shuttle…?”

  “The whole team will be cut off,” Guzarwan confirmed. “Metzger won’t have any way of knowing what’s going on, or whether the team’s even alive or dead. Like I said, it’s all about uncertainty and buying time.”

  “I’d rather just blow the shuttle now and be done with it,” Vachali grumped. “But you want to play it cute, fine. You’re the boss.”

  “That’s right, I am,” Guzarwan said, putting an edge on his voice. “Get back to work. I’ll let you know when we’re ready to dock.”

  “You sure you don’t want to go EVA, too?” Vachali asked sarcastically.

  “I’ll let you know when we’re ready to dock,” Guzarwan repeated. “Out.” With a sharp flick of his finger, he cut off the com.

  “He’s right, you know,” Eigen said from behind him. “It won’t work. None of it will.”

  Guzarwan swiveled in his station to look at his two hostages, strapped into two of the fold-down jumpseats on the cockpit aft bulkhead. “You don’t think so?”

  “I know so.” Eigen nodded past Guzarwan. “I can see the gravitics readouts from here. Guardian’s going to have her wedge up before Saintonge.”

  “Probably,” Guzarwan agreed calmly. “And?”

  “So she’ll be fully maneuverable before Saintonge will be,” Eigen said. “Even if you’ve got enough wedge up to partially protect you, you’ll never be able to roll before she can line up along your bow and open fire.”

  “You assume she’ll risk war with Haven over a measly little battlecruiser that the RHN probably won’t even miss,” Guzarwan pointed out. “But, really, the argument’s moot. No matter how fast or maneuverable Guardian is, she’ll still have to turn around if she’s going to bring her bow weapons to bear.” He waved a hand toward the distant planetary horizon behind them. “Sadly for Guardian, halfway through her turn Jalla will bring Wanderer up over the horizon and put his missile through her unprotected flank.”

  Boulanger’s eyes went wide. Eigen didn’t even flinch.

  “You assume Commander Metzger will be so focused on Saintonge that she won’t be keeping an eye on everyone else in the system.”

  “No, actually, I assume there’s no way she’ll guess Wanderer has a military-grade missile aboard,” Guzarwan countered. “But it’ll be interesting to watch. Don’t you think so?”

  “If you’re still alive to see it.”

  “There’s that,” Guzarwan agreed. “Still, in light of this new information, perhaps you’d be interested in making some kind of deal that would ensure Guardian’s survival.”

  “What kind of deal?”

  “I don’t know,” Guzarwan said frankly. “Some way to disable her weapons would be best. As I’ve already said, we’re not interested in causing any more deaths here. Since we aren’t going to be able to activate Saintonge’s weapons, disabling Guardian’s would put us on an even keel. At that point, once our wedge is up we can all retire from the field and go our separate ways.”

  Eigen snorted.

  “Even if I was willing, how exactly do you think I could disable Guardian’s weapons from here?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea,” Guzarwan said. “It would probably involve contacting someone aboard and making the deal. Figuring that part out is your job.” He made a show of consulting his chrono. “But I’d advise you think quickly, because in approximately twenty minutes this offer will go away.”

  “As will Guardian?”

  Guzarwan smiled. “Yes. As will Guardian.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  “There it goes again,” Marine Sergeant Pohjola commented, nodding out the shuttle viewport as Saintonge’s starboard thrusters flared, sending the massive battlecruiser drifting to their right. “Sort of like a slow-motion pinball. Docking with something bouncing around like that would be a real trick.”

  Massingill nodded. She’d figured that was what Saintonge’s hijackers were up to when Pohjola first spotted the battlecruiser’s random thruster blasts.

  Just as well she’d never planned on docking the shuttle in the first place. “I hope they’re enjoying themselves,” she said. “Just make sure you keep us some distance. Holderlin, you read
y?”

  “We’re ready, Ma’am,” Sergeant Holderlin calmly from inside the aft-starboard airlock. His three teammates were lined up behind him, Holderlin’s own rock-steadiness in sharp contrast to their restless fidgeting.

  Massingill didn’t blame them. RMN basic training had included a couple of units of close-quarters self-defense, but no one who went through those classes ever seriously expected to use any of it. Now, not only were they going to be fighting, but they were going to be fighting in a foreign environment, against an unknown enemy, and for a nation and people that weren’t even their own.

  Personally, Massingill didn’t mind fighting for the Havenites. Right now, she didn’t care who she was fighting for or, really, whether she was fighting for anyone or any cause at all. All she cared about was that she was getting to take the battle to the people who’d killed her husband.

  A suffocating bitterness rose into her throat, burning with anger and grief. Alvis had been safe enough when he spoke to Metzger. He’d certainly been alive. But that safety must have somehow deserted him after that. Either the hijackers had found them, or he and Flanders had gone off to do something crazily heroic in an effort to save Flanders’s precious ship.

  Thanks to Guardian, Flanders’s ship had been saved. But Alvis had never called back.

  And he should have. He should have called to tell Guardian that the attack had been successful and that the hijackers were preparing to abandon ship. He should have called to warn Metzger that Guzarwan had hostages, including Captain Eigen.

  But he hadn’t called. Not then, not now. And he should have.

  If he was still alive.

  Of course he hadn’t gone to ground like Flanders had said they would. He’d probably tried to do something stupid. Scram the fusion plant, maybe, to keep Péridot from blowing when the missile wedge sliced through the hull. Or maybe he and Flanders had gone to try to rescue the hostages. She could easily see Alvis trying one or the other hair-brained scheme.

  Only it hadn’t worked. And he was dead.

  “Five seconds,” Pohjola called.

  Massingill took a deep breath and did a last check of her team. All three of them looked as nervous as Holderlin’s group. “You ready?” she asked them.

  “Yes, Ma’am,” Boysenko said. The other two—Riglan and O’Keefe—merely nodded wordlessly.

  Combat butterflies, one of Massingill’s DIs had called them. They’d be fine once they hit deck and the shooting started.

  Probably.

  “Go!” Pohjola called.

  In a single smooth motion Holderlin popped the outer hatch and flung himself out into space, the Alpine-style safety lines pulling the others in rapid order out behind him. “Five seconds,” Pohjola called again.

  Massingill nodded, getting a grip on her thruster control with one hand and taking hold of the outer hatch release with the other. With only three four-man teams available, they’d decided Holderlin’s group would penetrate Saintonge near the forward fusion plant radiator, with the goal of attacking either the bridge or CIC, while Pohjola’s team would breach somewhere in the vicinity of the hab module, where they could chose between harassing whoever was guarding the trapped Havenites or else tackling the fusion reactor room. Given the situation, standard procedure would normally have dictated that Massingill’s team find a point of entry near one of the impeller rooms, with the goal of damaging or otherwise shutting down the ring.

  Massingill had come up with something slightly more creative. Whether it was brilliantly creative or stupidly creative remained to be seen.

  “Go!”

  Massingill keyed the hatch and pulled on the hand bar, hurling herself out into the vast nothingness outside. She felt the three slight tugs on the Alpine line as the other three fell out behind her in sequence, then keyed her thruster. The tension on the line increased sharply, the shuttle’s stern flashed by, and the line tension decreased as her team kicked in their own thrusters. Checking to make sure all three were still attached, Massingill shifted her eyes toward the massive battlecruiser beneath them.

  As always, Pohjola’s timing had been perfect. She and the others were angling straight toward Saintonge’s hab section, with its fancy grav plates that Alvis had been hoping to get a look at. Far more interesting to Massingill at the moment was the narrow zero-gee sheath running around the outer edge of the hab section that allowed for personnel and equipment transfer without such traffic having to go through the ship’s living quarters. Part of that sheath was given over to the docking ring for the battlecruiser’s four shuttles.

  One of the docking ports was currently empty. One of them was occupied by the shuttle the first group of hijackers had brought over from Péridot.

  And as Saintonge’s crew hadn’t expected an incursion from its own spacecraft, so too the hijackers probably weren’t expecting a counterattack from theirs.

  Alone, Massingill could have made the touchdown and reached the docked shuttle in two minutes. Dragging three amateurs along behind her, it was closer to four.

  “What happens if we can’t get it open?” Riglan asked nervously as Massingill worked at the cockpit drop-lock, a small emergency escape route that she’d never heard of anyone actually using. “I mean—”

  He broke off as Massingill popped the outer hatch. “I’ll go first,” she said as she maneuvered herself into the cramped space. “When it cycles again, it’ll be Riglan, O’Keefe, and Boysenko.”

  The disadvantage of drop-locks, Massingill had been taught, was that they offered no freedom of movement whatsoever if you came under fire. Their advantage was that the small volume translated to a quick cycling time. Another three minutes, and the team was at the shuttle’s docking collar, peering cautiously into the deserted bay and passageway beyond.

  Massingill gave a scan with her suit’s audio sensors, just to make sure, then gestured to the others to pop their helmets. “Looks clear,” she murmured, feeling a twinge of guilt as they opened their heads to the outside air. Her own Marine vac suit included a full sensor package, and was designed to be kept zipped during an incursion.

  Unfortunately, the others’ standard-issue ship suits weren’t so well equipped, and the risk of blundering into an enemy because you couldn’t hear him was higher than the risk of taking gas, debris, or a grazing shot. Hence, it was buckets-off from here on.

  Not that their helmets would be much good against a full-on shot anyway, she knew. Or their suits, either, for that matter. “Sling your helmets—make sure your headsets are muted but receiving—and let’s go.”

  The headed down the passageway, swimming quickly and mostly quietly through the zero-gee. Guzarwan’s shuttle, Massingill knew, would be docking soon, and someone from the first group of hijackers would be there to meet it.

  Whatever Guzarwan had planned for his reception committee, it was about to get a little bigger. And a whole lot livelier.

  * * *

  “It’s risky,” Metzger said reluctantly. “But I think you’re right. We really don’t have any other choice.”

  “Well, if we’re going to do it, we need to start now,” Calkin said. “We’re not going to beat Guzarwan’s shuttle there as it is.”

  Floating behind them, Travis felt his throat tighten. He’d hoped they might be able to use the same trick on Saintonge that they had on Péridot. But the mathematics of geometry—Guardian was still orbiting below Saintonge and stern-first to her—plus the physics of inertia—it would take nearly six minutes on thrusters for Guardian to rotate the necessary one-eighty degrees to bring her weapons to bear, plus however more minutes it would take to gain altitude to match her orbit to Saintonge’s current level—had combined to made that tactic unusable. There simply was no way to get into a position where they could send a missile wedge along the Saintonge’s axis to take out her nodes.

  And with nothing cleaner to go with, Metzger and Calkin had fallen back on their original plan for Péridot: to instead send a missile at Saintonge at an upward angle wh
ere it would slice across its bow endcap, tear through its forward impeller ring, bridge, and CIC, and hopefully disrupt things enough to keep her from bringing up her wedge.

  And, as an inevitable consequence, kill every Havenite unlucky enough to be trapped in that third of the ship.

  But the timer was rapidly counting down, and Metzger had to do something. Sixteen minutes from now, if Kountouriote’s calculations were correct, Saintonge would have her full wedge and be ready to make a run for Secour’s hyper limit and freedom. The fact that Guardian would have her own wedge up three minutes before that sounded like it should be a tactical advantage, but really wasn’t. Not unless Guardian wanted to destroy the battlecruiser, which Metzger had already made clear that she didn’t.

  So instead of a kill, Guardian would try for a decapitation.

  “Still, if we’re fast enough, Captain Eigen shouldn’t be all the way to the bridge before we’re ready to fire,” Metzger continued. “Especially if Massingill’s able to pin them down in their shuttle. Any idea what the penetration of autocannon shells on a stationary target would be?”

  “Not sure anyone’s ever run those numbers,” Calkin said. “I wouldn’t count on them doing any good, though. Explosives designed to take out a missile coming in at five thousand klicks per second probably won’t do much against an armored endcap or impeller ring.” He waved a hand. “But we can try it first if you’d like.”

  “Probably not worth it.” Metzger hit her intercom key. “Missile Ops; bridge. Status?”

  “Nearly ready, Ma’am,” Donnelly’s voice came back. “We were having trouble charging the capacitors, but we’re back on track. Two minutes, max, and we’ll be ready.”