Cloak of War

by Casey Calouette

  This feels wrong.

  “Captain, hand over that pistol. You may remain on the bridge and in command. It’s for your own safety.” I hope my voice doesn’t sound as nervous as I feel.

  Hallverson squeezes the butt of the pistol. The grin on his face grows, and I know that’s his answer.

  One punch. That’s all I need, all I have to get. It’ll be like Tyson. Boom. Down.

  Baskins calls out, “Light cruisers have a contact! They’re requesting we scout it.”

  “Come on, Jager. You gonna dance, boy?” Hallverson yells.

  Hartford bursts onto the bridge and rushes to Dr. Mohammad. He looks up with his old man’s eyes at both of us. “What have you done?”

  Hallverson never takes his eyes off me. “Get him off the bridge.”

  Hartford stands and stammers. “You’ve killed him! By God, this has gone far enough!”

  “He’s not dead. Now get him off my bridge!”

  Baskin calls again. “Do I confirm, sir?”

  Hallverson looks right at me. “Well, Jager? Do you confirm? You taking the bridge? Taking my command? They’ve got a word for that, boy. Mutiny.”

  Mutiny. I swallow hard and feel myself shrink. My duty is to the mission. “I officially protest this, and the navy will know—”

  Hallverson waves me off; he knows I’m beat. “Get the hell out of my way, Jager. Supervise Astrogation and shut the hell up. Raj, set course, sound the alarm, bounce on my call. Tell those cruisers we’re inbound.”

  Hartford steps closer. “First Winkelman, then Colby, now the doctor. Captain Hallverson!” He lays a hand on Hallverson’s arm and peers at him with tear-streaked eyes. “This must stop!”

  “Don’t tell me when to stop! You know what you signed up for, old man. Five years ago, you wanted to die. I swore revenge for you—for all of you!” Hallverson says with a sweep of his arm. “Now get that doctor off my bridge and prepare for action!”

  Hartford staggers back. He scoops up the doctor gently and struggles to stand.

  I step down from the captain’s platform and stand behind Raj. Wrong. It feels so wrong. Is that what the navy is about? Is all of this worth it? There are three freighters with enough ordnance to destroy our fleets. Enough that if we lose this engagement, the war could tip against us.

  I sneak a glance over my shoulder at Hallverson. Not only do I have to do my duty, but I have to survive to see Hallverson pay. If all he wants is revenge, it’s now my duty to make sure we do our job first, and only then can he get his way.

  Again I’m the outsider. The only one that can lay out truth when the last torpedo leaves the tubes.

  Three more freighters. Three more torpedoes.

  Hartford staggers through the hatch with the doctor. A second later, the hatch seals and my ears pop. Each compartment is its own space now, and the Orca is ready.

  “Bounce, bring us in thirty kilometers out. Sauce up on my call and prepare to fire. Do it.”

  The drive spools up. Henna calls the status in and acknowledges the load on the reactor, and then we’re off.

  We land just outside the orbit of a shaggy moon that’s wreathed in smoke and grit. Seventy-five kilometers off our bow are a half-dozen Tyrolean pawns. One is stringing up a line of ammunition into another.

  Normally a half-dozen pawns would be enough to grind us into dust, but they’re far off. We can’t close the gap, nor do we want to. Our torpedoes are precious enough.

  Hallverson swears. “Down plane, keep range. No sauce. Call in those cruisers.”

  I acknowledge Raj’s course input.

  “Contact!” Raj yells.

  A single Tyrolean freighter blinks in a few kilometers off the line of pawns. Then, just behind the massive bulk of that freighter, blinks the White Queen. Even at seventy kilometers away I can tell it’s her. I know it. The AI should take a second more to call it out.

  Hallverson rockets to his feet. “Full spread! All torpedoes on the Queen!”

  Katzen changes the firing plot, lays out a new set, and stops. His fingers hover over his console. He turns and looks over at me and Raj.

  “Sir, the freighter?” Katzen says, a quiver in his voice.

  “Hell no!” Hallverson shouts. “Fire! Fire now!”

  In those eyes are madness, anger, rage. Before him is the thing he’s devoted his life to and now, this very moment, is his chance.

  Hallverson vaults over the guardrail. His feet slam onto the deck, and he wrenches Katzen right out of his seat. “Get out of my way!”

  I’m closer, and before Hallverson can sit, I put myself between him and that console. “Sir! We have to hit that freighter!”

  Hallverson draws the pneumatic pistol. “I’ve had enough of this—”

  Collision alarms blast across the bridge. The Orca lurches drunkenly, and I fly across the room and crash into a bulkhead. Hallverson lands right on top of me a second later. We pull at least three gravities; the force on me is amazing.

  Hallverson grunts and tries to push himself up, but it’s too much, even for him.

  The entire wing of light cruisers lands right within optimal range off of that group of pawns.

  The AI has taken control of the ship in a critical moment and altered course to save us.

  Later, I’ll come to find out that wing of light cruisers was also running with a motley pack of retrofitted civilian craft. It was a mob of epic proportions. Most of those freighters and mining vessels landed with the cruisers but one, a particularly lucky craft called the Rose of Sharon, used our position instead of the hostiles’ reported position.

  So that blockade runner, a nimble industrial hauler, landed about fifty meters off our bow. Except there’s not much nimble about a five-hundred-ton hauler landing right in your path.

  On a good day, the Orca could have made the maneuver. But not with a half-shot reactor, mangled hull plates, and a bridge crew in chaos.

  The nose of the Orca, already stripped of armor to help in such events, collides with an empty cargo attachment on the Rose of Sharon. In that moment, Hallverson is thrown off of me and into the front of the bridge. I try to hang on, put every ounce of my strength into holding a pipe, but I can’t do it. This time, I crash into Hallverson.

  The sound of scraping metal and crunching steel echoes through our hull. Damage control alarms blare. A mournful roar is the last sound to push through the hull. That, luckily, is the sound of the cargo mount shearing off of the Rose of Sharon.

  We are free and, oddly enough, safe.

  Sixty kilometers away, that line of cruisers hammers into the Tyrolean freighter. They pay no mind to the pawns or even the White Queen. We caught a supply rendezvous right as it was happening. It’s likely that the freighter and the Queen were already coming before they even knew we had arrived.

  Sometimes the speed of light works for you.

  “No!” Hallverson bellows. He throws me off and stumbles to his feet.

  The freighter burns from a dozen different holes. Unfortunately, a half-dozen of our own ships burn with it. The Queen punches lances of energy across that short gap and hammers our line. Then she glitters and winks out. The Queen is gone.

  Our bridge crew fights to stabilize the Orca. The artificial gravity kicks back in, and everything is suddenly manageable.

  “Orca, this is the Rose of Sharon. Do you require any assistance?” a woman’s voice with a MaoQin accent calls over the comms.

  “You fucking morons!” Hallverson bellows at the speakers. “Get me a scan. Where did the Queen go? Where?”

  Katzen pulls a chief named Higgins off of the engineering console. The man mutters through a broken nose. “Engineering is asking for some help, sir.”

  Hallverson glares at me. “Go see what they want.”

  Baskins wipes blood from his face, but just as quickly a fresh stream runs down from his nose. “Sir, fleet is requesting assistance around the colony.”

  Hallverson snarls and climbs back into his chair. “Fuck ’em. Set
course, get me a damage report. Goddammit, where’d the Queen go?”

  I stumble toward the hatch, clutch at my sore ribs, and decide that I just might have to take control. We have a mission to do. The Queen be damned.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  I sprint down the length of ship.

  Every bulkhead I pass shows blinking orange lights. Damage. The Orca is in rough shape. At two points we have maintenance teams struggling to reinforce collapsed struts. Sebic supervises one, Hauptmann the other.

  Huttola crawls out of an access hatch just as I run past.

  “Hey!” he shouts at me. “The hell is going on?”

  “Almost had the Queen, then some half-witted civilian freighter bounced into our position, and we had a little bang up.”

  “The Queen?” Huttola gasps. “Did we…?”

  I shake my head.

  Huttola swears.

  “Captain cold-cocked the doctor, sent him off the bridge. I think he’s having another episode.”

  Huttola wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and gives me a short nod. “Don’t get in his way, Jager, not now. He’ll eat you up.”

  I slap Huttola on the back and push past him. “We’ll be going in again soon. Get your teams ready for action!”

  A part of me wants to ask Huttola to help. But I know better. I’m still the outsider, and what can I say really? If the part about the doctor doesn’t faze him, then there isn’t a damned thing I can say that’ll swing him to my side.

  When I pass by the section with the bounce drive, I slow down, just a bit. Colby. We’ve halfway patched up the damage. But you can still tell we took one hell of a hit. It pains me to think of her floating somewhere in space.

  Deep space doesn’t offer much of a sailor’s sea burial.

  At the final bulkhead, the hatch light glows red. Beyond it, I see the Engineering staff tending the reactor with Henna’s off-colored suit at the main console.

  I snap up the turtle shell of my helmet and seal up. The air tastes stale; it always does. For a quick second, I have a vision of the last time Henna and I went into a fight like this. Hopefully, this one goes better.

  They pop one side of the hatch, and I crawl through into a temporary airlock. The thin plastic bubble shudders as they pump the atmosphere back into the room. Then I see the problem.

  Just above the reactor assembly is a massive pressure hull crease pressing down onto the beryllium heat pipes. Those pipes are beyond essential; they wick away the excess reactor heat and put them out into our niobium heat sinks. Already we’re down a few banks of heat sinks. This is going to make it even worse.

  “Jager!” Henna yells over the local comms. “What the hell happened? We got smashed something fierce and kinked that pipe. I’m down to 60 percent efficiency of what we had, and that’s shit.”

  I gawk up at the crease and explain what happened. “Can we fix it?”

  Three engineers look at me like I’m stupid. Only Henna speaks. “No.” She keys up a private channel. “Listen, we need to stop now. You get up front and tell that asshole we’re done. We barely have the power to bounce.”

  Shit. There’s zero chance that I’ll convince Hallverson to call off the crusade, not now. Not with the Queen almost in his sights.

  I tell her what happened with the doctor. Even through her visor I see the look of disbelief.

  “You need to remove him from command.”

  “He’s got the pneumatic pistol, and by God, we’re the fastest-bouncing ships that the fleets have. They need to us knock out those freighters.”

  “Goddammit!” Henna swears. “We’re a paper fucking tiger right now, Karl. One spark, and we burn. You tell that asshole. You tell him now.”

  A tone sounds in my ear: the general alarm to prepare for a bounce followed by immediate action. I crawl into the airlock, and the moment it purges I race through the hatch.

  The Orca bounces. The lights flicker just as I pass the midpoint of the ship. This time the systems are slow on the uptake. Artificial gravity wavers, and for a brief moment I find myself pedaling air and coasting down the hall.

  It kicks back in, and I slam down. Shit’s getting funky.

  “Jager!” Hartford calls to me. He has Dr. Mohammad on one of the amidships bunks. The doctor is half-awake with two chipped front teeth.

  “Doctor, the hell is happening to him?”

  Dr. Mohammad spits out a mouthful of blood. “He’s breaking down. At this point, the only thing holding him together is revenge.”

  “Why didn’t you stop him before, Doctor?”

  He shakes his head slowly. “I know his pain; I know what he’s going through. I…I couldn’t. Not now.”

  Hartford looks at the doctor and then to me. “What’s going to happen?”

  The doctor gives me a bitter smile. “The same thing that always happens. He’s growing more unstable by the minute. He’ll start slipping in and out of reality until he finally locks himself into the past. You need to stop him; otherwise, we’re all damned.”

  “So how do I do that?” There’s no way Hallverson will relinquish command.

  “Here.” Dr. Mohammad hands me a thin syringe. “Get him with that.”

  I leave them both. The syringe feels tiny in my hand. I tuck it into a pouch on my suit and head to the bridge. Raj, Katzen, and Baskins stand beside the door.

  Raj shrugs. “Captain brought in his watch.”

  “Shit.” At least with my guys we had a chance, but Hallverson’s bridge crew are his men. “Wait here. I might need some help.”

  Raj looks at Katzen. “Are you…?”

  “We’ll see, eh?” I reply back.

  I step onto the bridge and blink my eyes at the viewscreen. We’re cloaked a hundred kilometers off the remnants of a ConFed battle group. A line of Tyrolean bishops and knights is hammering fire against a pair of Everest-class supercarriers.

  At least fifty fighter-bombers rage through the Tyrolean line and punish them for getting so close. But those carriers can’t hold long, not against the combined fire that close. They aren’t designed for it. But then I see why: just behind them is a single magnetic inhibitor.

  The Tyroleans can’t bounce while that is still alive.

  Hallverson watches the screen and taps his fingers on his chair. “Well?”

  “Reactor is down to 60 percent. Henna says we’re one hit from falling apart. We can barely bounce.”

  I scan the bridge. Chief Wallace sits at astrogation. A woman named Pochinko mans the weapons terminal. The others I know by sight but not by name. Their suits are so worn that I can’t read the name tags on the back. But it tells me all I need to know. These ones are the hardcore ones, the ones who spurned me when I tried to breathe some hope.

  Hallverson frowns at the viewscreen. He slams his gloved fist down onto his chair. “We’re stuck until that inhibitor goes down!”

  “Any of the freighters?” I ask.

  “Negative.”

  “Sir, that’s our mission, not the Queen.”

  Hallverson turns to look at me. “Those freighters have priority, but by God, I’ll kill the Queen if I get my chance.”

  “But your word as a captain, the freighters first?” I say to him. My eyes lock on his—not as a threat but to know in my soul if he’s true or not.

  “On my word as a captain,” Hallverson says in a serious tone. “Keep an eye on that engineering console.”

  “Yes, sir,” I say, and walk behind an older man with droopy cheeks who runs the engineering terminal.

  Do I believe him? I want to. I really do. But can I? No, I know I can’t. That is an oily promise if I ever heard one.

  When should I strike? We’re in a lull, even if it is momentary. Another pack of ConFed ships has to be inbound. There’s no way they’d leave Everest-class ships all alone like this.

  One of the supercarriers buckles under the combined fire of the Tyrolean line. But the Tyroleans are bleeding, and hard. Then two of our heavy cruisers comes in ri
ght on top of the hostile line; a moment later, a dozen light destroyers—a few even have missile boats attached to the side.

  There’s an amazing violence to a pair of heavy cruisers. They call them Shermans, and they hit harder than that old general ever could. Both sides bristle with weapons designed to smash things and smash them close. Too close for a missile to gain any velocity, so they stab with mass drivers and neutron cannons.

  It’s beautiful to watch.

  “Lay course for the second point,” Hallverson says. “They’ll drop that inhibitor once that last Tyrolean goes down.”

  His tone is level, passive, clinical. Right now, the inhibitor is an obstacle beyond his control.

  I back away from the console and check the syringe. The cap pops off and reveals a tiny little needle. Now is my chance. Hit him here before we jump into another brawl. My heart slams in my chest.

  Mutiny or duty?

  I take two more steps closer. In the neck? Or maybe it would punch through the suit? The needle is barely twenty millimeters long. I can’t risk the suit. Has to be the neck.

  Two more steps. It feels like I’m passing in slow motion, wading through molasses, like I’m in the eighth round of a slugging match, the sort of feel you get when your skull’s been pounded for the last seven rounds and just standing is a miracle.

  Hallverson turns his head and looks at me with his steely eyes. He cocks his head just the slightest bit, as if about to ask a question.

  I squeeze down tight on the syringe and place my thumb on the back. My eyes lock with his. An alarm sounds behind me. I ignore it. Now is my chance.

  Hallverson looks right past me. “Bounce.”

  A blinding-white light fills the bridge. We bounce right out of the cloaking gas. Our external sensors go white. The outside feed is suddenly overloaded, and the viewscreen goes wild.

  I stumble as the Orca slams right into another magnetic inhibitor field. The syringe slips out from the glove of my suit and tumbles through the air. It lands with a clink and shatters against the edge of a floor panel.

  My eyes snap up to Hallverson. I’m barely half a meter away from him. But his eyes are locked on the viewscreen.