On a world like Kepler 9813-B, there would be no large nodes, so the first explorer ship would have left a satellite which would be linked to a node somewhere. Messages intended to go off-system would be sent to that satellite, and that message could be intercepted. If the Porto tried to communicate with the station, that would almost certainly be picked up by any ship in the system.
“Well, we could use the hadrons back to PEM302, then have it re-routed here and sent out under standard comms.”
“And whoever is out there won’t be able to pick us up?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Captain, send a message to them to hold on, and we’ll be there in two days.”
“But we can get you there sooner than that.”
“Yes, sir. But we can’t get there in time. Those unfortunate souls are lost,” Esther said. “We can’t save them, but maybe we can flush out who’re the attackers.”
“Ah, I get it. Pass that, and then sit here and see who bites.”
“Yes, sir.”
The skipper paused for a moment, head tilted up as he thought about it, and then he grabbed a stylus and started scribbling on his PA.
“Pass that over the hadrons via NF3, Greg, and make sure it comes back over the node in the open.”
“Aye-aye, sir.”
Esther stood silent, her nerves on fire as she waited for the petty officer to sent the message.
A few moments later, the speakers broke with “K9813B Alpha Three, this is the FS Admiral Miguel Posov. We are on our way, ETA 40.32 hours. Hold on the best you can.”
“I can’t hold on that long!”
“Understand your situation. Get into your panic room and wait. Do not attempt to resist or secure property. God be with you.”
“The Posov, sir?” Esther asked.
“Might as well make it something with a little more punch than we have. And I know she’s out cruising right now. We sent that out through Third Fleet, and they’ll tell the Posov to keep low for the next 40 hours.”
With the message sent, it was time to wait to see if anyone took the bait and reacted. It didn’t take long.
Less than two minutes had passed when the comms chief said, “I’ve got an anomaly, sir. Probably a shielded ship moving closer to the planet.”
“Brotherhood?” the skipper asked.
“I’m running the probabilities on that, but I don’t think so. Looks commercial, probably Yantos-made, possibly GE.”
Esther had been listening with every fiber of her body, and she was relieved to find out that the ship was commercial. They just didn’t have the strength to take on most Brotherhood men-of-war.
Esther hoped that the message would save the lives of the station personnel. The message, however, gave the attackers a timeline, and whatever research was on the station would be taken and whisked away. Even if they launched now, Esther doubted they could get there in time to prevent that.
But we don’t have to stop them on the surface, now, do we?
“Sir,” Esther asked, “Are your lifeboats shielded?”
“No,” the master chief, “Boats,” they called him, answered for the skipper. “That sort of defeats the purpose of a life boat in being seen. Our rekis are shielded, though.”
“You have rekis? I didn’t see them on the manifest.”
The Porto was not a full-sized ship of the line. There was no Stork or Navy fighter sitting in a hangar bay. As far as Esther had known, the ship only had her shuttles and lifeboats.
“I don’t think they were originally part of the TE, but we’ve had them as long as I’ve been aboard. They’re in C24. I can have them assembled in an hour.”
“So, they’re the R version?” Esther asked.
“That’s affirm.”
“Captain, I take it that you want to take your Marines and seize that ship out there?” the skipper asked her.
“Yes, sir. I’m assuming you don’t want to break your own shielding by firing at the vessel, and I know the Federation doesn’t want any of the research to get out of the system. We don’t know what’s being uploaded, but all the samples will need to be lifted off the surface.
“And there’s another thing. If we’re going to have to clear out the bad guys, I’d rather they didn’t have any support the ship there can provide. I want them cut off.”
The skipper seemed to contemplate it, but he didn’t answer with a yes or no, and this was his call.
“Any more information, Ears?” he asked the JG.
“Their shielding is pretty good, but I’m getting enough gravitational disturbances to know they’re out there, and it looks like they’re heading to take up a position along a standard ascent profile for the station.”
“How long to reach a launch point for the rekis, given full stealth?” the captain asked the navigator.
“About six hours, sir. Anything faster, and we’ll start to lose stealth. If we launch the rekis, though, sir, and if there’s a Brotherhood ship out there, she’ll see the sleds,” she said.
“She’ll know something is out there, like I know we’ve got something out there, but she won’t know exactly what,” Ears said. “She won’t know they’re Federation rekis.”
The captain chewed his lower lip as he processed all this for a few moments before making his decision, saying, “Nav, bring her in.
“And Captain Lysander, what’s your plan?”
Chapter 12
The target ship, a Yantos Executive III, looked huge in the near distance, and Esther felt extremely vulnerable. Through the pinholes poked into the reki’s tarnkappe, she could see the individual EVA crewmen offloading a shuttle into the ship. She felt as if one errant look by one of them, and they’d be spotted.
The R-version reki, was heavily shielded from normal surveillance, and the sled had a large version of the infantry trankappe, which essentially “bent” light around the sled, making it invisible to the naked eye when viewed straight on. Still, anyone from the side could see them. Esther trusted the Navy coxswain to keep the right attitude, but mistakes happened.
This was Esther’s second space-borne operation. Traditionally, this was the Corps’ bread-and-butter, but over the centuries, the Corps had become more of a land force. However, as the very first Marines, the Roman I and II Adiutrix, were a sea-borne infantry—something her history-loving father had pounded into her young head as a child—Esther felt the pull of tradition.
She still felt awfully naked and exposed, though, and even the knowledge that the Porto was only 20 short klicks away was not that much of a comfort.
Esther was leading the boarding section. Ahead of her, Gunny Medicine Crow was leading the clearing section. Her section would take out as many of the enemy as they could and secure the hangar, clearing the way for Esther’s team to board and secure the rest of the ship. Their priority was to keep the hangar bay doors open. If they were closed before the Marine could board, then they would have to resort to the breaching chamber. That would probably result in either the ship’s crew arranging for a hot reception or the ship merely taking off. The Porto wouldn’t let that happen, but Esther didn’t want her Marines in the crossfire between two ships.
Up ahead, less than 500 meters away, Esther could see the gunny’s sled as it approached. They were on a comms blackout, so she had only a basic idea of what was going on. When the gunny opened fire, that would be Esther’s signal to go.
Firing projectile weapons in null-G was not easy with weapons designed for planetary usage. However, Esther had noted that the gunny had logged hours upon hours on the null-G simulators, so aside from being the senior enlisted Marine, she was probably the most qualified.
“She’s orienting her aspect,” the coxswain passed on the hardwire comms on the sled.
Esther could see the reki rotating. The gunny had explained that while the orientation didn’t matter in space—there was no up or down, after all—but from a shooter’s perspective, they tended to be more accurate when the orientation was th
e same. With the artificial gravity, the ship had an up and down, and she wanted to be on the same axis. What that meant to Esther was that the assault was getting close to kicking off.
“Get ready,” she passed on the wire to the rest of the section.
Suddenly, there was a flurry of activity around the ship. A crewman, dressed in his green cargo overalls, dropped just as he reached for the red emergency door button. It was eerily silent, with no air to carry the sound and the comms still off.
“Move it,” she ordered the coxswain.
And then the comms silence was broken as the gunny passed, “Find the gunners!”
Esther kept off the net herself. She didn’t want to alert the ship’s crew.
They glided forward, and Esther wanted to tear down the tarnkappe to see what was going on. The pinhole was just too small to get the big picture. She could see the Marines enter the hangar, but she couldn’t tell if they were winning or not.
The coxswain swung around to pierce the atmospheric curtain when the gunny finally passed, “Falcon One, we are secure.”
“Roger that. We’re 30 seconds out,” Esther said.
Esther tore away the tarnkappe as they came in. The coxswain had the reki at a slight angle as she breached the curtain, and there was that slight moment of disorientation as gravity took control of their inner ears.
Ignoring the Marines and prisoners, her section rushed to the main hatch into the rest of the ship. Sergeant Piccolo set a small breaching device against the hatch, and ten seconds later, it erupted in a glorious display of purple, yellow, and blue sparks that reached out to fall slowly to the deck. Piccolo kicked the hatch, and it swung open. Within moments, Esther’s team was dashing through.
Esther hadn’t fought with any of the Marines before, and they’d had only half an hour to rehearse aboard the Porto, but this was when training kicked in. Everyone knew what he or she had to do.
Ahead of her, a crewman in engineer purples came out of a hatch, saw, them, and ducked back inside. Piccolo looked back as Esther for instructions, but she waved him forward. She didn’t care about a lone sailor. She wanted to secure the bridge before the ship started to move out.
They’d pulled up the schematics of a Yantos Executive III before leaving, and so far, the schematics had been true to form. This ship had not undergone major modifications. Two minutes after breaching the hatch in the hangar, they were at the bridge—which was closed off.
Esther gave Staff Sergeant Cezar Constaninescu the signal, and he placed the charge he’d been carrying along the edge of the hatch.
“Fire in the hole!” he shouted, as the rest of them crowded back into the passage.
“Stop! Don’t blow it!” a voice came over the 1MC. “We surrender!”
The staff sergeant looked back at Esther with a questioning look, but it was too late. She wasn’t going to send him forward to try and stop the charge, risking it going off in his face.
“I’d get back as far as I could if I were you!” she shouted into the air.
A moment later, there was a muffled boom, and the Marines darted forward. Piccolo kicked in the hatch, which had been askance, and the rest poured into the room, weapons ready.
Five sailors were inside the bridge, all just getting to their feet, hands in the air. There was no fight in them
“I’m Captain Esther Lysander, United Federation Marine Corps. This ship is now mine.”
KEPLER 9813-B
Chapter 13
“Roger that,” Esther said, trying to keep her cool.
She closed the connection, resisting the temptation to punch the display. The comms “station,” which was a grandiose term for what was merely a table pushed up against the wall with her gear on it, was in the research station’s main room, and she was aware that eyes were on her. She couldn’t let any one of her Marines see that she was frustrated with Dr. Tantou, to put it mildly.
Esther and her Marines, along with the FCDC Installation Security team, had arrived at the station two days earlier to find 16 citizens killed during the takeover. Three people had been discovered alive, but in a state of shock.
Esther had initially decided to leave the civilians in the team aboard the Porto until she could ensure that the ground situation was safe. Dr. Tantou had vetoed that idea, insisting that his team come down to “inventory” the station, which Esther knew meant see what might have been taken that hadn’t been recovered.
Esther tried to get the COM to listen to reason, figuring he’d be concerned with his own skin, but to no avail. He simply told her that security was her bailiwick, so “secure it.”
And that was what Esther was trying to do. The research station was designed for 30 people. With 17 Marines, 16 civilians, and eight FCDC station guards, the station’s life-support systems would be taxed to the limit. The slightest breach in the station, whether caused by an accident or outside action, could push the station past the breaking point. The Marines could survive outside the station for a week or more inside their HED 2’s or Hazardous Environment Deployment System 2’s. They might not be as robust as the Marines’ System 3’s, but they would do. The FCDC troopers had their own suits that would allow them to perform outside the station for up to 48 hours. The civilians simply had vacuum suits that got them from the shuttle to the station’s airlock. They were rated for 30 minutes in the planet’s atmosphere.
If it came to a breach, the civilians needed to don the emergency enviro-suits that should keep them alive for 16-20 hours. The issue with Esther was that none of the civilians had ever put on the suits before.
It seemed logical to Esther that all personnel go through drills to make sure they knew what to do should a breach occur. With that in mind, she scheduled a drill for that afternoon (with no planetary rotation, there was no night or day, so they were using Earth GMT time). She’d summoned Tantou to the intercom—Marines and FCDC, who were openly—and dismissively—referred to as “muscle,” were restricted from the main lab—and told him to get his people ready, and he’d flat out refused. They were “too busy,” and she’d simply have to make sure there was no breach that could overcome the station’s self-repairing capabilities.
In Esther’s opinion, his reaction contravened the MOU between the three organizations. She had the final say in issues of security, and this was a security matter. So she’d marched over to the comms and, using the Porto as a relay, connected with her minder back wherever he was. The minder had blown her off, for all intents and purposes, so she’d contacted the colonel.
She didn’t get the answer she’d hoped.
“Stand down, Captain,” he’d said. “Feel free to drill your Marines and the FCDC troopers, but it’s hands off the civilians. That’s coming from on high. I trust I’m making myself clear?”
Esther was a Marine and would follow orders, even if she didn’t like them. She had full responsibility for security, but she had no control over the group least trained to deal with a contingency. That contingency could very well become a reality.
The Porto had moved farther out from the planet, but not before running a full planetary scan. That scan revealed that there was a heavily shielded (not shielded enough, evidently) group of humans located about 2,000 klicks north of the research station. The Porto’s Intel officer aboard the ship gave it an 86% probability that they were a mid-level corporate pirate group, hoping to grab a few discoveries and run back to the parent company where whatever they’d found could be exploited. Esther would most likely be tasked with rounding them up, but as they posed no real physical threat at the moment, that would only occur once the Federation station was secure.
“At the moment,” however, was hardly a guarantee. The first station had not been protected as there had been no credible threat, and Esther could see how that played out.
Security was the Marine’s highest priority at the moment, so Esther had to focus on that. With Tantou nixing the EA drills, she had to push forward with what she could control. She’d already had
the FCDC team set up their hi-sec entrance to the station, and she’d given orders to the two gunnies to plan orientation patrols. They had to see the lay of the land if they were going to be able to defend it, much less go on the offense.
The first patrol might be for orientation, but some of the corporate mercs who’d killed Federation citizens were still out there. Just because they’d run didn’t mean they wouldn’t strike again if given the opportunity.
She looked back at the secured hatch leading into the lab, thinking dark thoughts about the COM, wishing she could throw them like mental daggers. That wasn’t going to do any good, but the image of him reeling under her superpowers made her smile for the briefest moment.
This might be a long, long, deployment, she told herself as she turned back to her Marines.
Chapter 14
Esther listened with half an ear as Gunny Medicine Crow’s team watched the entertainment screen. She could sometimes get lost in the programs, but each time she tried to watch, her mind came up with something new she thought she had to address. She’d only been in an independent command once, with her MARSOC team on Elysium. While the threat had been far greater there, she knew what she faced, and the action kept her occupied. Here, her mind jumped from one possibility to another, and no matter how unlikely each one was, she felt she had to plan for it.
She turned her head to see the large display where Verry Onkle of the Alliance Explorer Corps was managing another improbable crisis while relying on her rather extensive cleavage and sexuality. Esther couldn’t refrain from rolling her eyes, and she wondered how Gunny Medicine Crow and Sergeant Delay could watch that crap, but they seemed addicted to it.
The alarm jolted her, and she was on her feet before it registered on her, slapping on her helmet. She’d ordered that the Marines and troopers keep on their suits at all times unless they were in the autojets showering, and their helmets had to be within reach. She’d run several drills, demanding three seconds for compliance. With her own helmet sealed, she was pleased to see that the gunny’s entire section was suited up as well.
The United Federation Marine Corps' Lysander Twins: The Complete Series: Books 1-5 Page 83