The Bonds of Orion

by Owen R. O’Neill

  That would make them members of one of the Amu Darian separatist groups. Sutton knew nothing of the what groups were active in this area. Amu Daria had been selected for their destination after the raid on Haslar because of the independence movement here. It had been hoped the rebels would shelter them and, if possible, aid them in getting off planet. But far from being united, the various groups were ruled by independent warlords who were often mutually antagonistic. Some were little better than terrorists, others seemed more interested in exploiting the populace in the areas they controlled than dislodging Halith, and there were a number who appeared willing to sell their services to the highest bidder, regardless of affiliation.

  Their first encounters with these people had not gone well, owing to the separatist’s views on women in combat, especially in command, and Colonel Yeager had forbidden any further contact. For their part, the colonel’s private war had earned the enmity of several groups by stirring up the local Halith forces in a manner they found inconvenient. That had served to isolate the unit further.

  Sutton scrutinized the triangles as if force of will alone could make them reveal their secrets. “What’s on the people’s mind, Hitch?”

  “Well, sir, seein’ as how they’re so close, we thought maybe it might do to reconnoiter. See what they’re intentions are, maybe. Maybe explore . . .” His voice rasped to a halt.

  “Maybe get shot? Or sold?”

  “Same risk we been runnin’, Major. But this time . . . there’s some of us think that maybe we should take a hand here. While we can. We, ahh . . . hoped you might come in with us.”

  “And the Colonel?” Sutton asked as Hitch clicked the xel off.

  “If you was to come in, and they are who we think they are, she’d see reason. Wouldn’t she, Major? If you talked to her?”

  Not bloody likely.

  Unconsciously, Sutton ground his boot heel on the limestone. A bit of recon made sense. But if he let them go off, even if he went with them, there’d be no turning back. Some might stay, others would desert; Christina, when she found out, might be in a killing mood. It would be the end of the unit, in any case. Were they really that desperate?

  A bit of recon did make sense. But not if it threatened the unit’s fragile integrity. There was one way that might achieve that. One that Christina might accept.

  “I hear you, Hitch.” As the relief washed over the other man’s face, he spoke to stem that tide. “But I want you to go back and tell the people to stand down on this. Then get me some cold-weather kit and a pair of skis.” Downhill like this, he could reach their camp in less than an hour. He couldn’t take a xel, of course that would compromise the whole unit if these people turned out to be the wrong sort, and going armed was equally pointless.

  “You’re gonna go by yourself, Major?”

  “That’s right. If this plays out right, I’ll be back in the morning. If it plays out wrong, keep the people together, Hitch. Trust the Colonel.” Taking out his own xel, he rapped out a quick message in the unfurled display, signed, sealed and locked it. Then he handed it across to Hitch, who looked at it like a death warrant. “And see that she gets that.”

  “Yessir.” He tucked the xel away.

  “Now get your ass in gear and get me those skis.”

  “Yessir.” Hitch lurched to his feet. “Comin’ right up, sir.”

  Chapter 13

  Ahvaland, Karelia

  Karelian Republic, The Perseids

  As the canopy sealed with its characteristic hiss and the indicator glowed green, Kris swallowed instinctively to ease the feeling in her ears from the cockpit’s slight overpressure. The dry, scentless air tickled her nose, and the butterflies in her stomach ceased their wild gyrations while the med-monitors showed her heartbeat returning to its resting rate of sixty-nine beats per minute; still a trifle elevated, but nothing like the pounding against her ribs she’d felt walking with Huron across the melt-rock paving of the jet park at Ahvaland, the major Karelian military base outside the capital of Vaasa.

  It had been one year, one month and one week by the Terran calendar 404 GAT day-cycles since she’d strapped in to a fighter: the day Tanner died and Baz nearly did. The day she lost the use of her arm and she thought everything else along with it.

  But here she was, back where she belonged after finally getting her flight rating back, and even if this was only a training mission, there was still that feeling of rightness, so long missing; so deeply, profoundly missed. A touch brought the HUD to life and her fingers curled around the controls while she sat just sat breathing the desiccated air, savoring the faintly effervescent quality from the oxygen boost, and drinking it all in. It didn’t matter (much) that this was in no sense her bird and one she could not love: an older trans-atmo Phantom with the big engine, extremely fast but a trifle sluggish in handling and subject to a nasty cross-coupling in the attitude controls when pushed hard. She was finally back where she belonged.

  Three weeks they had been on Karelia. Three hectic weeks. These joint exercises between allied militaries involving command center exercises, fleet exercises, field exercises with the ground forces, joint maneuvers, various kinds of training and a large variety of drills, culminating in a full-fledged war game were usually ponderous affairs. Kris would not have been surprised to have several days, even a full duty week, expended on tedious meetings in which politically minded admirals and their stuffy staff officers pontificated on what they were about, its critical nature and the absolute necessity to “lose not a minute” while wasting them wholesale, and their “off-duty” hours were spent with tedious full-dress meet-and-greet affairs, awash in alcohol or leaden food, according to the predilections of the hosts.

  These dismal expectations were demolished, though, when the chief of the Karelian general staff, a stout person not much taller than the diminutive Admiral Sabr, with a broad robber-baron face under that peculiar slouch hat that was particular to the Karelian military, boarded Ninth Fleet’s flagship. In the briefest of meetings, he announced he disliked formality (he’d arrived in rumpled khakis and might have been taken for an hard-working NCO but for the five stars on his shoulder straps) and he did like things done briskly. Proving it, he announced with Admiral Sabr that the first fleet exercise was to be held within 24 hours: a “sneak attack” by Ninth Fleet elements against a key outpost of the Karelian naval base on Tuonela, a moon which (as Kris learned) was named for the Karelian’s version of Hell. After this, the two commanders assured their audience, they would pick up the pace.

  They did. Lo Gai had been ordered not to go easy on the Karelians in these exercises, and he’d taken that very much to heart (which, incidentally, surprised no one). The Karelian Navy, though small, had a fierce reputation that it richly deserved. But that reputation had been earned in the defense of their own system, not in interstellar engagements. Furthermore, Lo Gai had brought something of a stacked deck with him.

  The CEF Navy did not embrace the notion of elite units, at least not out loud, and had they been so nominated, Ninth Fleet would have scorned the title. But their history nonetheless earned them that distinction. Formed around what had been Lo Gai Sabr’s Task Force 34 of Third Fleet, the celebrated unit that had launched Colonel Yeager’s Raid, turned the tide at Third Miranda and held the line at Outbound Station alone during Wogan’s Reef, Ninth Fleet boasted more battle honors than any other in the CEF. More recently, they had added to their legend by spearheading Operation Overlight. Then, of course, there was Lo Gai himself, whose legend as the most feared admiral in the CEF could hardly be added to.

  The Karelian defenders in this opening exercise had at first been confident of their ability to handle whatever, or whoever, Lo Gai threw at them. They were holding their own ground against an adversary required to create an op plan on the spur of the moment, and if the same applied to them, they’d been through this drill many times. But in the end, they went home, chastened and grumbling, and with a much better appreciation of how the dimin
utive admiral had come by his reputation.

  Nor was this the only occasion the Karelians had for grumbling. Time and again over these three weeks, bold and valiant Karelian navy units went down in notional flames against their cold, clinical, and surgically ruthless Ninth Fleet counterparts. That was, of course, a key part of the overall objective. To play the role the CEF envisioned for them in the final reduction of Halith, a role the Karelian military had most eagerly sought, their capabilities had to be brought to a new level. To achieve this, they had to be humbled. So humbled they would be.

  The highlight of this humbling had, it was generally agreed, occurred 48 hours ago, during the war game that closed out the first phase of the joint exercise. What solace the Karelians had gained came from their ground forces who, spurred by the tribulations of their naval brethren, had scored some welcome victories over the CEF marines. On this particular occasion, Lieutenant Colonel Lewis’ Anandale Rangers were pitted against two crack Karelian regiments, defending a ‘starport’. It might have a fair fight, had not Lo Gai also employed CAT 5.

  The Karelian command center for the huge remote base hosting the war game was a good six hundred kilometers away from the ‘starport’ that was the assigned objective. It was not within the war game’s nominal area, nor was it conceived that it would play a direct role. The personnel there were more in the character of observers than active participants. But it did represent an obvious center of gravity for the whole exercise; obvious, that is, to Admiral Sabr and CAT 5. And, the command center’s ostensible status as noncombatants being set aside, they resolved to exploit it.

  That is not to say the command center was a soft target. The Karelians reckoned it to be as secure as a headquarters could well be, with a sensor net that would alert them to any armed force within eighty-five kilometers, even a small stealthy one on foot, three rings of automated defenses, and a couple of infantry platoons providing security with supporting units ten minutes away by air.

  But they reckoned without Corporal Vasquez, who covered those 85 klicks over broken ground in four and half hours, in the dark of night, carrying nothing but thirty meters of rope and a grapnel. Overhead imagery showed the headquarters building to be three stories high and fitted with skylights: four-centimeters thick and set in deep wells in the roof to protect them from direct ground fire and most blast effects. But not against a jagged fifty-kilo rock, hauled up to the roof by Vasquez, who’d scaled the walls using her rope and grapnel, and then flung down several meters with terrific force.

  Nor were the officers in the command center, enjoying an oh-dark-thirty snack and swapping predictions about how their forces would devastate the enemy in the morning, prepared to deal with the short corporal dropping through the shattered skylight into their midst. A brief minute later, Vasquez was in control, disabling sensors and letting in Sergeant Major Yu and the rest of CAT 5 (who’d been lying doggo with air sliders just out of sensor range) to secure the remainder of the building. They then set about messing up comms, misdirecting units and generally creating such havoc that by 0800 local, the bewildered, angry and defeated Karelian regiments were concluding that “those Anandale sons of bitches must’ve turned a double somersault and landed in our rear.”

  And Colonel Lewis was treating the Karelian brigadier in command to a sumptuous breakfast in her field HQ and telling him not to take it so hard.

  Beyond smiling at the chortling in the mess, none of this concerned Kris or Huron directly. As flight instructors, their three weeks had been taken up with simulations and observing their students, thirty-two of the best and brightest from the Karelian Navy’s fighter branch, going at each other in evenly matched red-team, blue-team combat drills. They were a fine bunch of young flight officers, skillful and appropriately cocky. But today, Huron had announced that he was putting them up against CEF flight officers as the red team, while all thirty-two of them formed the blue team. He added they would enjoy a “significant” numerical advantage.

  He did not say that the red team would consist of only him and Kris.

  The Karelians had boosted out twenty minutes ago, on their way to defend a collection of orbiting crates that represented their ‘fleet’. Kris and Huron would move to the attack whenever the exercise referees gave the word. And the Karelians would receive (or so Kris intended) a “big fuck’n surprise”.

  The head range umpire came on over her helmet set: the word was given. Huron acknowledged, and she watched as he guided his fighter down the taxiway to the launch point. The air in his wake churned by his jet wash, obscuring his fighter’s black outline, then became lost entirely as the twin engines lit like small suns and the craft bolted up and away, leaving a glowing trail in the sky’s otherwise faultless blue.

  Taking her place on the line, she gently eased the throttle open while keeping the brakes locked, feeling the strain, the tense mounting expectation, the subtle vibration of the airframe that called forth an answering flutter deep in her chest. The seconds counted down, the sky returned to its undisturbed state, and orbital traffic control flashed a launch signal on her HUD. Letting the brakes go, feeling the thrust back in the seat, the odd elastic pull of the acceleration dampers as her fighter shot forward under a full 50 gees, she pulled the nose up and the sky opened before her like a giant lidless azure eye.

  Climbing rapidly, that eye darkened, descending through an infinity of shades to the welcoming, limitless black, adorned with a rich, unchanging diamond spray of stars. Silence as she cut the engines, pure and perfect; that paradoxical feeling of peace a state of grace, even over which the anticipation of the upcoming encounter shimmered like light reflecting from still, deep water.

  Up ahead, Huron loitered, a distant mote above the planet’s glowing limb, and as their IFF systems completed their pro forma handshake, she keyed the tight-beam link on.

  “Top of the morning to you, Commander,” came Huron’s jocular greeting. “How’s tricks?”

  That was an oblique private reference to the techniques they’d developed when flying together at the beginning of Kris’ career, and which had played a major role in boosting her so quickly into the upper reaches of the kills list.

  “All good,” she answered. That flutter was still there, not unpleasant, and as she took a deeper breath, she felt a mild shiver scamper across her shoulders. “How’re we gonna do this?” Their quarry no, their students were on the opposite side of the world, up near the GEO line. That ruled out any approach by stealth; a nontrivial consideration when attacking at odds of 16 to 1.

  “As I see it,” Huron answered, “we can do this by the book” making Kris wrinkle her nose “or” almost as if he’d seen her reaction “we can slash and burn.”

  “I’ll vote for slash and burn,” she replied, her tone verging on emphatic. “I’d like to get off early today.”

  That brought a chuckle from the other end of the link. “Slash and burn” was one of their tricks, although there was nothing especially tricky about it. The technique simply consisted of slashing attacks on opposing vectors at boost levels so high, missiles would not lock. By reducing things to a series of split-second gun battles, it made the engagement purely a matter of impeccable timing and peerless marksmanship, in which Kris and Huron had few, if any, equals. Furthermore, their fighters were admirably well suited to it and, due to their relative lack of agility, not much else.

  “I’ll vote with you,” Huron said, sounding pleased. “Slash and burn it is.”

  * * *

  The walk from the hanger back to the ready room gave Kris and Huron ample time to school the grins off their faces and assume a decent approximation of a sober professional demeanor. In truth, the grins were not entirely discreditable; their pupils had actually done better than expected. They had been suitably aggressive, and they hadn’t been notably sloppy. Their big mistake, when confronted with a series of initial attacks that were over in an eye-blink and left six of their number “dead” and like number damaged all without getting a singl
e hit in payback was to form a luffberry, a purely defensive formation that was difficult to execute with the necessary precision. For that reason, it was referred to by CEF flight officers as a “bait ball”. Kris and Huron had famously broken a Halith luffberry at Wogan’s Reef. Huron had taken the lead then, so this time Kris did the honors. The result was equally devastating to their opponents.

  But if the luffberry was a mistake, being beyond their students’ current skills, they at least had the nerve to try it. If a few had lost their head at the end from seeing their squadron mates so thoroughly and rapidly extinguished, that was understandable this time.

  As Kris and Huron entered the ready room together, the students jumped to their feet to the clatter of several chairs overturning and assumed an extremely rigid species of attention. Right arms flew to cap brims as one, as if a precise salute might redeem their failure. There was no real failure, of course, but Huron was gratified to see they were not taking this exercise lightly and that the seven ‘survivors’ appeared to be as mortified as the twenty-five ‘casualties’.

  He snapped a crisp salute in reply and ordered them to be seated. They resumed their seats much more slowly than they had left them and he walked to the omnisynth and leaned against the front, affecting a relaxed, even slightly careless, pose.

  “Alright, gentlemen,” he began after he’d held their attention for a silent minute, “you can now say you’ve been in a fair fight.” A few chuckles answered this, but more had looks of blank incomprehension. “Don’t let it happen again.” He cracked a smile, and now those who were a bit slow on the uptake joined in the grins.

  “If you ever find yourself in a fair fight, you’re using the wrong tactics.” He took out his xel and linked his flight recorder data to the omnisynth; Kris uploaded hers as well, and he brought up the combat volume and began to chart the sensor plots through it. “Now that we’ve established that, let’s look at what made this a fair fight.”