The Gray Matter (Rebels and Patriots Book 3)

by A. G. Claymore

  So Little must have been right. Life support was down, leaving only waste gasses inside. She fervently hoped that meant he’d be right about the repairs needed.

  The force of the venting gas quickly abated and she yanked on the handle to pull her way inside, not wanting to let her men be the first to risk taking fire. She floated up into the chamber at an angle, seeing enemy crewmen – crewclones? – picking themselves up from the floor. She drew her sidearm but drifted into the grav effect of the deck plating and tumbled to the deck before she could pull her trigger.

  The next man in rolled immediately to the side, having been drilled in this kind of work, and began firing on the enemy.

  By the time the third security operator came in through the trunk, the chamber had been cleared.

  Robin was already on her feet and raced to the center pedestal to pull the cable linking terminals throughout the ship to the self-destruct device. She fogged her visor with relief as she looked down at the thin red disconnected optical cable in her hand. If this had been installed on a Human ship, the cable probably would have been replaced with a length of licorice a long time ago.

  She was cold. There was no life support to heat this vented compartment and she’d been sweating profusely with the adrenaline rush of the initial boarding action. She ignored the discomfort, gladly accepting the cold over the searing heat that could have been unleashed.

  “Tactical, this is the captain. All clear. I say again, all clear. Commence boarding operations.”

  She went to work on the self-destruct as her security team fanned out to clear the adjacent engineering spaces. She started with a calming breath. It was bad enough she was shivering from the cold. Being jumpy was the last thing she needed right now.

  She jumped, nonetheless, as the amber circle around the cable housing suddenly started to blink in green. Someone on the bridge had just tried to blow the ship.

  It had been pretty close, but to her adrenaline-fueled mind, it seemed like ages since she’d pulled that cable. She settled down to the task of deactivating the circular array of firing circuits, each one needing its power supply disconnected.

  By the time she’d finished, the second wave of boarding teams were entering the ship. The security officer would be leading a large group to the bridge but there weren’t enough shuttles for the whole crew. Several dozen escape pods would be docking with the pod portals on this ship.

  Hundreds of armed crewmen would come swarming through the bottom hatches of the enemy escape pods and into the ship at multiple locations.

  She stepped back from the nuke with a satisfied sigh. The ship was hers. The previous crew was now just a nuisance to be dealt with.

  She saw motion and spun around, her pistol in her hand, though she didn’t remember drawing it. Little’s helmet protruded into the compartment from the escape trunk. “Permission to come aboard, Captain?” His voice sounded oddly distant through her helmet speakers, despite only being three meters away.

  “Come on in,” she waved him up. “You got the parts?”

  “We’ll know pretty soon,” he replied carefully. He went over to a control panel on the port side of the compartment and hit a green button.

  Robin resisted the impulse to jump back as the large floor hatch snapped open. It was all the more startling because the impact vibrated the deck plates and the soles of her boots, propagating the sound up through the air in her suit. She was growing accustomed to the silence of vacuum and the appearance of a sudden apparent drop through the hatch, accompanied by the startling noise, was a strain on her already heavily taxed nerves.

  A hastily wrapped pallet of parts floated up through the opening, accompanied by the techs who’d remained behind with Little. The big square hatch was rammed shut again and they drifted gently to the floor, bouncing lightly before the grav-plates reached full output, holding them firmly down.

  Another tech came in through the escape trunk, and it closed behind him. Robin distinctly heard a double impact through her suit and realized he’d cut the temporary weld on the safety clip.

  “Well,” Little’s voice sounded in her helmet, “they needed the entropy shunt alright. We should be able to get her fixed in no time.”

  Robin turned to look for him, but he wasn’t in sight. Knowing, from the fact that her proximity vox was picking up his musings, that he had to be within a limited range, she moved around the self-destruct pedestal and walked through the only open hatch in the compartment.

  Her security chief reported that he’d secured the bridge. Confident that he had the fight well in hand, she decided to concentrate on finding out how soon they could get underway.

  “Bozhemoi!” Little exclaimed. “You Oblom piece of gavno!”

  Robin quickened her pace to find Little kicking angrily at a mounting pedestal in the middle of the compartment. It was covered in a slimy blue substance. Small fragments of clear glaz-casing slid down the sides of the structure, accelerated slightly with each kick.

  “What’s the problem?” Robin demanded.

  The engineer turned to her as his technicians entered, carrying parts over to an alcove where a smashed glaz-case tube was sparking erratically from its now-exposed conduits. “This is a new problem,” he told her grimly. “Long story short, this is, or was, an energy filter. Makes sure that power to the distortion drive is clean enough. Too many variables when you’re trying to shift the Universe past your ship and BOOM!”

  Robin was coming down off her adrenaline high by this point so she wasn’t terribly startled by Little’s outburst. “So, where does that leave us?”

  “Well,” Little glanced over at his techs just as a new sound began humming beneath the deck. “It leaves us in the middle of a junkyard. Might be we could find the right parts, seeing as the dead ships are all the same model as ours. And there’s a spot of good news as well…”

  He looked down at his wrist pad as a chime sounded in their helmets. A good news type of chime. He pulled off his helmet.

  Robin started to look at her pad but turned the motion into a reach for her own helmet release. If Little wasn’t grabbing his throat in panic, the chime obviously meant the oxygen levels had stabilized.

  “Told you we’d get that repair done in no time,” he reminded her cheerfully. “Now we’ve got life support as well as theoretical power for the mains; we just need to scrub the power if we want to use ‘em.”

  “You said you have good news…”

  “Oh yeah.” Little grinned. “Bad news is we have to go search the wreckage for a new scrubber, but the good news is we only have two ships to search before we find out if we’re still humped or not.”

  Robin took another calming breath. “You know, that just sounds like you’re trying to stuff bad news into a mini-skirt.”

  “Did I mention we can use the pitch drives?”

  “Really? Hells, why didn’t you say so? Now we can limp back to the rendezvous in eighteen months or so. Maybe even pull the grav plating and make a big old-fashioned gravity sail like the first colonists used to have…”

  Little’s eyes lit up. “Now that’d be fun! We could just use the…” He stopped as Robin waved him off.

  “Right, right,” he conceded. “Work first, play later. If you can get somebody up in the bridge to move us closer to one of the frigates, I’ll get a team together to do a little browsing.”

  Just Smash

  “That’s a big one,” the sensor officer declared. “More than enough containers down there that we’d have to run this raid five or six times just to clean em out.”

  “Sending our last three freighters in.” Ava acknowledged, updating the holo command lists. There was no sense in spreading the converted privateers if they could fill their holds at one station. It would also give them an added measure of security if enemy ships happened to show up.

  They’d been lucky so far, but it was a luck of their own manufacture. This sector hadn’t seen much fighting in the ‘Purist’ conflict. Most of the ves
sels were freighters, bringing containers to the stations where they were consolidated and re-loaded onto other freighters and taken to their ultimate destination.

  Some warships were being replenished or refitted here, but Tel Khorgo was mainly a massive distribution center. It had been chosen as a target because it would be lightly defended and rich in valuable goods that, if denied to the enemy, would damage their ability to project force into Human-held territory.

  With the last freighters assigned to shopping duty, the raid became a simple matter of shooting anything they laid eyes on. It took very little to destroy a station. The fleet was orbiting in the opposite direction of the stations and the rounds fired were imparting an incredible amount of kinetic energy.

  Aside from the actual damage done by the impacts, the stations as well as the cargo and docked vessels were fatally slowed to a point where they were no longer balancing the force of the planet’s gravity. The cargo containers mostly broke free of their moorings or entire lattices snapped free of the station, but they’d still been slowed enough in the process to fall into the grip of Tel Khorgo.

  “Next station coming over the horizon,” Sensor announced. “Sweet zombie Stalin, this facility has more than five times the cargo of that last one.”

  Ava fought a momentary sense that she’d missed an opportunity, shoving it aside as she remembered that the last station had more than enough cargo to fill her privateer ship’s holds. “This raid just keeps getting better and better,” she said, just loudly enough for the entire bridge to hear.

  “I’ll say,” Korolev affirmed. “We’re already leaving with full holds and we still get to destroy several more times that in Gray supplies.”

  Ava nodded, glad to see he’d caught her point. “The next best thing to stealing something from the enemy is ensuring he doesn’t get to use it himself.”

  “Contact!” Tactical announced. “Three frigates coming up from the surface. Still at very low velocity.”

  Ava activated a group icon. “Captain Korolev, they’re all yours.”

  Korolev shot her a nod of thanks. “Aye, ma’am. Helm, slave to fire control. Let’s get our mains pointed down there before Higgins can swing that slovenly bucket of his around. I’ve got a bottle of Stoli that says we can take the first target.”

  Their ship continued along with the formation, but she and the second ship in her temporary grouping rotated to aim down into Tel Khorgo’s atmosphere. Teams on both ships were working frantically to be first to fire.

  “Loading black hats,” Tactical advised. The carbon-matrix coating on the ‘black hat’ ammunition were needed if you wanted to fire on an intra-atmospheric target and have anything solid left for impact.

  So far, the raid was going well, but Ava couldn’t help but wonder about the frigate she’d had to leave on the way in. It would be another couple of centidays before they could swing back around and try to make contact.

  In a damaged ship, two hundredths of a day could be an eternity.

  Or an introduction to eternity…

  A Break Can’t Be Caught

  “Thank the gods,” Little heard one of his techs exclaim. “Their scrubbers are intact.”

  That was a bit of good news for a change, and on the first ship they’d checked. Little drifted into the central compartment to find three of his team working to detach the units. “Good,” he said, turning back toward the hole they’d come in through. “I’ll go out where I can get a clear shot – let the captain know the good news.

  They were using laser comms, unsure of what surprises may be lurking in the wreckage. No sense letting them pick up radio transmissions and learning that revenge might be a possibility.

  Before he reached the hole in the hull, a brilliant flash shone through it, casting harsh shadows inside the compartment. Then another, and another, and another.

  “Bozhemoi!” Little glided toward the opening and peeked through a tear in its side. Four cruisers. They must have just arrived for supplies. The Grays would never dispatch four cruisers to fight a force like Commodore Klum had brought here. They’d be hopelessly outgunned.

  Their own recently acquired ship, however, was in far more danger. If the new arrivals stopped to investigate the debris field they’d just dropped in next to, things would get very interesting.

  “Come on,” he whispered to the Gray ships. “Worry about the stations in orbit. They’re your priority. Ain’t nothing here but dead Grays.”

  The four human ships left to grab cargo on this side of Tel Khorgo had already moved off, having fired enough rounds to destroy the stations and knock them out of orbit.

  A lot of those stations wouldn’t have started burning up yet and rescuing the crews might just give the newly arrived enemy ships a sense of urgency.

  The sight of the nearest cruiser filled his visor and he felt a shiver of fear, but she continued her silent progress toward Tel Khorgo. He glanced over at his own ship. Metzker knew her business. She’d be keeping the crew out of trouble until this was over.

  He looked back. One cruiser was turning their way. Little turned and moved toward the aft passageway, seeing his team approaching with the scrubbers.

  It was enough to make you cry. They had what they needed to pull off a heroic self-rescue and, yet, it was starting to look like they were going to get a 200-kg enema after all. He held up a warning hand, motioning for them to wait there, and, waving his hand palm down, aimed at his own mouth in the standard ‘shut your pieholes’ gesture. He moved back to the hole.

  The cruiser was coming closer and Little was racking his brain, comparing his damage assessments for the frigate they’d seized as well as the one he was currently floating in. Limited propulsion in their new ship, two mains damaged but the other two still in good working order. Metzker would have those loaded right now but she’d have to swing the ship around to bring them to bear.

  The ship they were salvaging parts from might have had one gun in working order, but it would take far too long to get his team down there and there weren’t enough men to work the weapon and run the targeting solutions.

  An absolutely useless waste of time and energy, and he was just turning around to issue orders to get his team started on it when his eyes fell on the self-destruct terminal.

  “Karkada, MacAdam, get to work disconnecting that self-destruct. We might need it soon.”

  Little drifted over to the damage control locker and pulled out a pair of comm-links. He stared down at them, wondering if their range was enough. He grabbed a third and moved over to the pedestal.

  He might be able to do something about the cruiser coming his way, but the other three would turn back and he had no clever plan for that. He shrugged. You rarely fix a big hairy problem all at once. Start with what you can deal with and go from there.

  Fate

  “The rest of our fleet should be coming around the edge of the planet, ma’am,” Tactical advised. “Any milli now.”

  Robin was fighting back a wave of panic that threatened to completely swamp her and the interruption came at just the right moment. “Very well,” she replied. “We’ll have to hope we can have their help with some of our new guests.” She almost didn’t believe those calm words had come from her own mouth, but she knew there were problems she could do something about and others that were beyond her control for the moment.

  They were currently alone. The other captains had been given very specific orders not to stop until the objectives had been achieved. Any rescue would have to wait until after the fleet returned from the far side of the planet and she wasn’t content sit idle in the meantime – not when there were other options.

  The cruiser was coming in very close to the debris field. Perhaps it was going to search for survivors. She knew they’d find the Humans on this frigate soon enough. “Helm, slave to Tactical.”

  “Helm slaving to Tactical, aye, ma’am.”

  “Tactical, we don’t move till we have to. If they just run a scan and then move on, th
at’s just fine by me. Our priority is to get our crew back to the RV.” Robin waited until the tactical officer turned to look back at her. “Hold firing till I give the word, then we open with the secondary batteries. The shield generators on those bastards are always shifting the seams so I want them found before you use up the two rounds we have loaded in the main guns.”

  “Aye, ma’am,” he replied, “fire on your order only, secondaries first to identify the seams.”

  She looked back to the tactical holo. That cruiser was damned close now. It just wasn’t fair, but then combat never was. They’d managed to steal a chance by taking this ship and there was at least a fifty-percent chance that Little had his hands on some workable scrubbers by now. All they wanted to do was drag this busted-ass frigate back to the rendezvous point.

  And then this fully functional cruiser had to stick its nose into their business.

  Her eyebrows shot up. “Wo de tian a!” It was almost close enough for her to consider carrying the cruiser by boarding. Wouldn’t that be a hell of a story? Just like General Urbica’s taking of the Sucker Punch after taking and abandoning a Gray cruiser in Irricanan orbit.

  Or how Urbica and Grimm had seized a Gray cruiser only hours after Robin had found them locked up on another Gray ship.

  She looked around her bridge, wondering if it might be a good idea to trade up again. It would mean fighting only three cruisers instead of four.

  And a cruiser did have bigger main armaments…

  FUBAR

  “Hold it ready,” Little ordered. “One hand on the edge of the hole, the other on the nuke.”

  Karkada and MacAdam floated into position, the nuclear device held as far inside the compartment as they could. The reflection of the enemy hull filled their visors as the cruiser drifted past them.

  They would still have three enemy ships to deal with, but nuking the closest one should help preserve the one tactical advantage his own ship still retained. The enemy had no idea that one of the damaged frigates was in Human hands. They might be able to get off a devastating surprise hit against one of those cruisers, but it would only be a surprise the first time.