Spineward Sectors 6: Admiral's Spine

by Luke Sky Wachter

  “Aye, Chief,” the young crewman said jumping with excitement.

  The Chief Gunner ran in and snapped up a spare focusing crystal, stockpiled for just this reason and ran back for the mount.

  He had just cleared the door of the repair shop when there was a loud, cracking sound followed by screaming.

  Running up to the gun, he saw the mount’s Assistant Gunner lying motionless on the ground with crystal shards protruding from his face and chest. The man was clearly dead. But a not-quite-dead grease-monkey was rolling around on the floor beside the man and clutching his face as blood pooled on the deck from his wound.

  “Medic!” the Chief Gunner shouted, stepping over the poor lad he’d sent to into harm’s way with the now-deceased Assistant Gunner.

  “He-el-p,” the boy half shrieked, half glugged clutching at the Chief Gunner’s leg.

  “The medics are on the way, boy,” Lesner said jerking his leg loose. He got half a step before the boy grabbed him again. With a curse and a kick he freed himself, “I said ‘the medics are on their way,’ boy! Now shove off,” he shouted, his heart breaking inside him at the sight of the boy’s condition. There simply was no time to coddle the boy; any moment now, that droid ship could ram or destroy them with a surprise missile barrage. He’d called the medics and that was all he could do until he found out whether the gun was repairable or not.

  Stepping up to the opened breach containing the focusing array, he saw that the thing had overheated and, when it had been opened too quickly and exposed to the unsealed air of the gun deck, it had ruptured.

  “It’s my own Murphy-cursed fault,” he castigated himself for forgetting how untrained his gun crews were. They knew how to fight their weapons, but unlike the more seasoned gun-crews he was used to back in the SDF, these boys and girls hadn’t yet learned all the ins and outs of servicing their weapons. “I should have called a repair team,” he rebuked himself, even knowing in the back of his head that if faced with the very same problem as soon as he walked away from this weapon he’d do the same thing again.

  In a battle between capital ships, the guns were life. Even so much as a five second difference in getting a turbo-laser back in action could mean the difference between everyone onboard your ship living and dying.

  “The bridge crew might think they’re the most important part of this battle but without these guns this ship don’t be nothing but a sitting target,” he said, slapping on the thick rubber gloves hanging off his belt and hardening his heart to the piteous mewling going on behind him.

  Taking a deep breath, he shoved his hands into the still-smoking breech, knowing that some of the superheated crystal could still be inside and explode in his face just like with the Assistant Gunner. But he didn’t hesitate.

  “You there, Gunner,” he snapped, grabbing hold of a crystal before reefing it out and hurling as far away as a quick toss could manage, just in case it had any intention of blowing up in his face.

  “Yeah, Chief, I’m here,” the other man said hiding behind the corner of his gun.

  “Think you’re too good to get your hands dirty on your own gun, man?” he bellowed with mock outrage. After all, only a fool—or a good Gunner—would run into close proximity of an exploding weapon.

  “No, Chief,” the man exclaimed hesitantly coming around into full view, “just trying not to get killed.”

  “Don’t worry, boy,” the Chief Gunner cried, pulling out as many little chunks of focusing crystal as he could as quickly as they could come, “if you take a hit there’s plenty of assistants dying to take your place. So get the blazes over here for some repair and maintenance 101; you’re not indispensable but this turbo sure is!”

  “Aye, Chief,” the man replied, taking a big gulp.

  With the help of the other man he managed to get the majority of the crystal fragments out and clear enough smoke to see the amount of damage done inside the breech.

  “Sweet Murphy’s ointment,” the Chief Gunner cursed, tearing off his rubber gloves, “she’s wrecked for our purposes. It’ll be at least a half hour job to change out the connectors. If we try to hook a new crystal in she’ll blow again for sure—this time probably taking the entire gun with her.”

  “It doesn’t look that bad, Chief,” the Gunner beside him said doubtfully.

  “The contacts aren’t just scarred, they’re cracked. Guns can take some general wearing and still fire, but not like this; call for a repair team…” then he looked around and cursed. There should have been a repair team there already.

  The laggards and the medic team came running up even as he was thinking about them.

  “Speak of the devil, and his slacking imps come running up at the last minute,” he growled. “Take care of this,” he shouted over his shoulder to the two teams, gesturing vaguely toward the dying grease-monkey and the damaged laser.

  He couldn’t wait around any longer on a gun that wouldn’t be fixed in time. If that turbo would have been the difference between victory and defeat then they were blasted, and it was going to be up to the rest of his gun-crews to make up the slack.

  “Come on!!” he raged into his com-set. “I need accuracy and precision; place those shots like you mean it men. I don’t have time to hold your hands like you were still in kindergarten.”

  Chapter 37: The Hand Over

  Being frog-marched from the little storage room they’d been barricaded in for so long they had almost killed one another wasn’t a process designed to instill anything but raw, unreasoning panic.

  The Lancers had only waited long enough for them to throw on their clothes and pack up their gear—or have it packed up in the Princess’s case—as she’d been too busy yelling at the crewmen’s impassive faces. Or, ‘crewwomen’ in the case of one short, thick, fireplug of a Lancer with sharp, Asiatic features.

  “I’m a Sector Representative with diplomatic immunity, you can’t treat me like this,” Bethany argued to the unresponsive escort and tugging futilely against the hands holding her arms, “manhandling me is unacceptable. I insist you let me go and tell me where you are taking me at once!”

  She continued on in that vein for some time before being interrupted.

  “You can’t do this; I’m on a diplomatic mission to—“ she seemed intent on wearing them down by gnawing their ears off with a flurry of words, when the powerfully-built woman holding her finally grunted with irritation.

  “You keep using this word, ‘can’t’,” the fireplug, female Lancer said in thickly-accented Confederation standard, “I think it means different than you think." As if to accentuate her point, she forcibly prodded Bethany down the corridor hard enough that the Royalist would have fallen on her face if she hadn’t taken several more steps toward their destination.

  There was a moment of shocked silence, as if Bethany was amazed to finally have received an answer, then her whole demeanor seemed to sharpen as if by these words she’d found some kind of chink in their armor.

  “I’m a Princess-Cadet from the same world as your Admiral, Jason Montagne. You must—” the Bethany started, but her guard was in no mood pulling her forward until she was half a step in front of her. The absurdly thick, muscular, female Lancer then placed both hands on Princess’s arms and squeezed hard enough to evoke a short squeal from Bethany’s lips.

  “I must break it?” she asked, again in heavily-accented Confederation standard. “This arm?” she clarified, speaking with slow, loud words, as if to an idiot as she raised Bethany’s left arm.

  “Well, I never,” Bethany said wide-eyed with amazement.

  “Silence—now,” said the other woman, flexing her arms slightly.

  The Princess-cadet winced and acquiesced, continuing down the corridor in an all-too-obvious attempt to relieve the pain which the thickly-built woman had inflicted with little more than a squeeze of her fingers on Bethany’s biceps.

  Tremblay was silently amused; it wasn’t often that someone got to see their betters treated as they deserved
and still remain stringently loyal to the Parliamentary-approved code of an officer and a gentleman. But in this rare case, the powers that be had rewarded him.

  Stumbling in pain, Bethany’s hand crept upward toward her hair.

  “Try to stick me and this one breaks your hand,” the Lancer said irritably, “this one reads reports.”

  “Fine,” Bethany said with ill humor, and ceased her less-than-covert attempt to pull out her hair stick.

  That hair stick had been one of the most potent reminders of the benefits of good behavior when they’d been stuck in the storage room and the Royal had been at her vocal worst. Tremblay also knew what those hair sticks could do, and he wanted nothing to do with them.

  Finally they stopped moving through the ship and stopped outside the lock of a type any spacer worth his salt—and even most neophytes of whatever persuasion—were very familiar with, if from nothing but holo-vids, and his blood ran cold.

  “What is this?” Bethany asked coldly.

  The Captain of the ship appeared from a side corridor and came to a stop in front of them.

  “You’re putting us in an escape pod?” Tremblay asked numbly, images of being put off the ship to drift in some out of the way inhabited system until the air went bad, the oxygen ran out, or they starved to death flitted through his brain.

  Barring extreme luck—such as a potentially inhabitable planet or a passing merchant ship taking mercy on them—they could drift until they died if that was the plan. The Space Gods knew Jason Montagne might find it a fitting end for a man who’d first betrayed him and then saved his life, putting him in a healing tank when there was little chance he would make it

  But that said nothing of the female cousin who had tried to kill his wife, stabbed him in the back, and then assisted in publically assassinating the Admiral’s character while he was on the trial for his life—a trial he had lost, due to which he had been subsequently scheduled for execution.

  “So this is his plan: to maroon me in some out of the way uninhabited star system,” Bethany said bitterly. “I don’t know why I’m surprised that this mission with the droids was all a farce from the get go. Although why it took you so long to reach a place to drop us off baffles me. Perhaps you hoped that if we were cooped up with only the two of us for company we would kill each other,” the Princess-cadet smiled sweetly, “sorry to disappoint you.”

  “We aren’t putting you off the ship as castaways,” Captain Middleton growled, “your mission goes forward. We’ll drop you off and leave the system—only after that will the droids risk picking you up.”

  “A likely story; one that even if we are found later will only go to prove the duplicity of the droid tribes and not that of Flat Nose, my oh-so-beloved Montagne cousin,” Bethany said her voice dripping with scorn.

  “I neither care what you think, nor what you have to say,” Middleton said coldly before handing each of them a data slate, “inside this is a copy of everything in our database that might help you on your mission. What little we have is yours and it’s in there—one for each of you.”

  Bethany opened her mouth, probably to say something scathing, and the Captain threatened to have her gagged before continuing to speak. But Tremblay wasn’t really paying any attention at that point while he contemplated the reality of what was about to happen to him: he was going to be put in an escape pod, dropped in cold space, and left for the droids!

  Middleton gave them a brief run-down on what little they knew, and what they were supposed to do to ensure the droids didn’t get suspicious and blow their unarmed escape pod to pieces.

  There was more said between the two of them, but Tremblay tuned them out. Whether it was death by slow starvation, or poisoned air, or by handing him over to the Machines, Admiral Montagne was getting his revenge. The chance that either he or Bethany surviving the tender mercies of one of the machine types that gave rise to the phrase ‘Man not Machine’ was so small in his mind as to be infinitesimal.

  Yet at the same time he knew exactly what the droids being pointed like a knife to Sector 25’s gut—and the Caprian star system—meant. It meant that if the chance of diverting their ire, even temporarily, was real then he couldn’t take the easy way out and die from attacking his captors straight out.

  Suicide by machine was an honorable enough way out, so long as he could take even one of them with him. After all, enough men and women in ancient times had done the same thing in order to buy time for friends, family and loved ones to escape the menace that doing the same was almost a patriotic duty. Yet Jason had seen fit to deny him even that small satisfaction.

  So when the Captain finished speaking, and the Lancers under his command prodded them into the escape pod and ejected them, Tremblay didn’t complain.

  He did smile, however, when they had to literally toss his fellow cellmate into the pod—and that smile broadened as she landed teakettle over spout with the lower half of her dress falling up and over her head.

  Even her furious look and scathing tongue did little to ruin the moment.

  “Well I’m glad someone liked seeing me get tossed into the shuttle like part of the luggage when all I was trying to do was keep us alive,” Bethany shouted at him.

  “This is an escape pod we’re in, Princess, not a shuttle,” Tremblay said scathingly, “try to keep your facts straight. Making these kinds of mistakes will let anyone who’s trained for duty in space know you’re completely inexperienced.”

  “I’m sorry if I bore you or appear to be an uninterested space novice while I’m trying to save our lives,” Bethany snapped.

  “Our lives are in the tender embrace of cold space, and before too long we’ll be transferred into the hands of the droids,” Tremblay said savagely. “There was nothing you could say to the Captain and crew of that ship that was ever going to change that.”

  “I will not go down this easily; if I have to charm these droids out of their chassis then that is what I will do,” Bethany said spitting as she spoke.

  “Better work on your bedside manner then, because it could use some serious improvement,” Tremblay said evenly.

  “I don’t recall you complaining the last time ‘the bedside’ and my ‘manner’ entered the conversation,” Bethany said flatly, “I think it’s been proven that I can be as charming as the situation calls for.”

  Tremblay looked at her and then shook his head, wearily getting up to go check on the limited cockpit they put into these escape pods. He would do anything for a few moments of temporary reprieve. As he’d learned over the past two years: if you can’t kill them, placate them until you could either get away or return the favor. And showing up to the droids in an escape pod with the murdered corpse of his fellow ambassador wasn’t a good way to start any new relationship.

  Chapter 38: The Aqua Nova Blitz

  The droid mother-ship came screaming towards us, but a last moment surge of the engines to beyond full military power—and a radical direction change—sent them careening past us. Seconds later the starboard gun crews threw enough weight of laser and plasma fire into her heavily-spotting shields to lance through and hit her engines.

  First one, and then three, and then over a dozen strikes landed on the droid mother-ship’s engines when suddenly there was a flash. The engines had exploded, taking the back quarter of the droid ship with it.

  “Yee-haw!” bellowed First Officer Eastwood as a chain reaction up the spine of the droid ship broke its back and took it out of the fight. It was nothing more than a heavily-damaged enemy ship rapidly moving from us and from the remaining battle for the system, “She’s gone Dutchman!”

  “Let her drift; we’ve still got two mother-ships to deal with,” I ordered, my eyes tracking furiously across the screen, “what’s the latest count on the remaining enemy gunboats?”

  “Including the ones that came around on the slingshot maneuver, the count is seventy nine enemy gunboats still operational with over half of them—really, closer to two thirds—still fo
llowing the Dutchman at high speed.”

  “They could come around at any time,” I growled as I glared at the two remaining mother-ships; they were the real problems here.

  No sooner had I thought that than the icon representing one of my corvettes started blinking and a yellow icon appearing around her.

  “The Captain of the MSP Corvette Swift Drake reports hull damage to his starboard side and internal structure. He says they’re venting into space and having trouble controlling the bleed. Apparently an enemy gunboat flew out of control after a laser strike and rammed them. They’ve lost their starboard shield generator and half their starboard broadside,” Lisa Steiner reported, running down the list of damage to the Corvette.

  “That’s good enough for now, Communications,” I interrupted cutting her off before turning back to the screen.

  As the Phoenix and Fleet continued to burn our engines for all they were worth wide and to the side of the two remaining droid ships, the enemy continued to pour the output of their main beams into the starboard shields of our Strike Cruiser.

  “Starboard shields now at 52% and falling,” Longbottom called out in a tension filled voice, “all power from the portside is being rerouted to the starboard side but we’re still starting to experience some spotting!”

  “How much longer until we pull out of range of the spinal lasers on those mother-ships, Mr. DuPont?” I demanded harshly.

  “We’re pulling away, Admiral, but those blasted droids are holding us in their engagement range longer than I thought,” the Helmsman said tautly.

  “Blast!” I scowled at the screen, and now that we were beyond all but a few straggling gunboats every ship in the fleet was firing on those two droid ships. Seeing the light cruiser and the two destroyers adding their weight of fire was encouraging, but it wasn’t happening fast enough for my taste. I wanted to pull us outside the range of these droid’s slow ships and pound them from a distance with our turbos. Forget the rest of the fleet; with her upgraded long range punch the Furious Phoenix could manhandle those two ships all by her lonesome.