Colonel Gaiene cocked his head to one side as if studying the image intently. “Just a few specks of light.”
“I can zoom it in.” The tiny dots of light blossomed into the lean shark shapes that ground forces had learned to fear and hate. One massive shark led the way, four much smaller shapes following in its wake like remoras.
“Our target,” Gaiene commented. “Why did I volunteer for this?”
“You didn’t,” Safir pointed out. “None of us did. We just got told to do it.”
“Was that what happened?”
Safir grinned. She had no trouble with his banter, recognizing when he was serious and when he was just trying to ward off emotion, and had also made it clear she wasn’t interested in any closer relationship even if Gaiene had dared to try it in the face of Drakon’s orders to avoid his own subordinates. All in all, a very valuable second-in-command. “When did that freighter leave?” he asked.
“Six hours ago.” Safir pointed to a part of the display showing space nearby. “Just poking along as if it were a routine supply ship on its way home. We got the final soldier and the last of the equipment under cover five hours ago.”
“Well done!” Gaiene waved an extravagant gesture of praise. “Our new friends from Ulindi will see nothing untoward here.”
“Just a nonoperational battleship, with hardly anyone on board, ripe for the plucking.” Safir sobered, eyeing Gaiene skeptically. “What do you think our odds are?”
“If our foes are confident? Not bad at all. And we have given them every reason to be confident, especially since if we had had a day or two less of warning, their confidence would have been fully justified, and this battleship would be doomed.” Gaiene pursed his mouth in thought. “Mind you, we will have to move carefully and make sure our people are distributed properly to provide an appropriate welcome when our guests arrive. How fast are our guests moving?”
“Point one light speed. The mobile forces called that right.”
“This is their battlefield, after all.” Gaiene looked at those far-off shark shapes and the vector data displayed under them. “If they don’t change their speed, we’ll have more than an entire standard day to get ready for them.”
Safir smiled again. “It doesn’t seem right to watch your opponent spend twenty-five hours charging at you. Like they’re stuck in something and moving very slowly.”
“Whereas they are actually in nothing and moving very quickly.” Gaiene glanced at Safir. “You have done ship boardings, haven’t you?”
“Only one, as a junior executive. It’s been a while.”
“It’s been too long for all of us,” Gaiene said with mock-sadness, drawing a grin from Safir at the barely masked innuendo. “But we were talking about boarding operations, not personal problems. We ground forces types are out of our element in space. Space is too big, too fast, too strange compared to operating on a planet or an asteroid or orbital facility. So we minimize the time we spend in space for this engagement. We fight here on this ship, then we fight there on that ship. Simple enough.”
“Except that everything that’s simple is very difficult.”
Gaiene nodded with an appreciative expression. “You’ve been reading the classics. Very good. Are you planning to command this brigade?”
Safir smiled again, though gently. “I’m happy as second-in-command.”
“So was I.” The former brigade commander had died in the same action that . . . Gaiene felt the darkness weighing on his spirit again and tried to shift the topic. “Let’s go over where everyone will take up position inside this large mobile unit. I want the entire brigade ready an hour before our guests come knocking.”
“Yes, sir.” Safir brought up a schematic of the battleship’s deck plan on the display, and they went to work.
Battleships normally carried a couple of thousand personnel. Until very recently, the Midway had only a couple of hundred aboard, and a good proportion of those were outfitters, construction specialists instead of mobile forces personnel. They could have put up a small fight against the kind of boarding party likely to come off of a battle cruiser, but with no chance of success.
But a warship big enough to carry a couple of thousand crew members could also carry a thousand soldiers with room to spare.
“THE last of the outfitters have left the Midway and are sheltering inside the dock facility,” the very-young-looking Kapitan-Leytenant Kontos reported to Colonel Gaiene. “If the battle cruiser conducts a high-speed, heavy-braking maneuver as I expect, they will be next to us in just under an hour.”
Like the rest of his soldiers, Gaiene was in battle armor and waiting at the spot inside the battleship from which he would begin the fight. He regarded the youthful Kapitan-Leytenant with an approving look that hid any trace of melancholy or wistfulness. He had been that young once, that enthusiastic once. That had been a long time ago, it seemed, but every once in a while someone like Kontos helped him remember. “Did the outfitters put on a convincing display of panic?” Gaiene asked.
“If I had not known it was an act, I would have believed it myself,” Kontos advised cheerfully. “Between you and me, I suspect some of the outfitters really are feeling a bit panicky.”
“I suspect you are right.”
“Gryphon and Basilisk are two light-minutes away from us. They look exactly like they are waiting for an excuse to run a lot farther and a lot faster. Both cruisers have received offers to defect to Supreme CEO Haris’s forces with promises of wealth, promotion, and happiness beyond the measure of men and women.”
Gaiene smiled again though only with his lips. Anyone who looked into his eyes would have seen no humor there. “Sounds tempting.”
“I don’t think Gryphon and Basilisk will be tempted,” Kontos replied with utter seriousness. “The mobile forces personnel still aboard Midway are all in the citadels. We will seal them when the battle cruiser approaches.” Kontos looked distressed. “I wish I could do more to assist your assault, but if any of our few operational weapons fire, they might well hit your own soldiers.”
“And the battle cruiser would shoot back,” Gaiene said. “We don’t want this pretty new ship of yours banged up. Your President wouldn’t like that, and I am endeavoring to stay on her good side.”
“President Iceni is a great leader,” Kontos replied.
He really believes that. Perhaps he’s right. What he doesn’t realize, because he lacks the experience, is that even great leaders can lead people into great disasters. Hopefully, this won’t be one of them. Iceni is a damned fine woman, though. Too bad she’s never made a pass at me. I wouldn’t dare make a pass at her. If she didn’t kill me, General Drakon would. “She is impressive,” Gaiene said out loud.
“Yes.” Kontos sounded almost reverent.
He worships the woman. Poor boy. I hope the impact when he encounters reality won’t leave too big a crater inside him.
“I have received another transmission from the battle cruiser,” Kontos said, his tone returning to a businesslike cadence.
“Your own offer of wealth, promotion, etc.?”
“No. I have received no such offer, possibly because the enemy commander knows that I would never betray our President.”
Or possibly because the enemy commander doesn’t see the need to offer you anything, believing that this battleship is fruit ripe for an easy plucking. “What are they saying?” Gaiene asked.
“They demand that I acknowledge their last demand to surrender.”
“Tell them no. Tell them that you’ll defend this ship to your dying breath.”
The image of Kontos squinted at Gaiene, puzzled. “I want them to expect strong resistance?”
“What you want,” Gaiene explained patiently, “is to make them expect you to resist as hard as you can. Which shouldn’t be very hard, of course, given how few people they think you have aboard thi
s battleship. But the prospect of determined resistance by your small contingent will cause them to put together a boarding party large enough to quickly overwhelm your skeleton crew. Then, when that boarding party gets here, my soldiers will destroy it and face correspondingly fewer crew members on the battle cruiser itself.”
“Ah. I see. I should act desperate and determined.”
“Absolutely.” Gaiene managed to muster another smile for the young Kapitan-Leytenant.
“I can do that,” Kontos said in a quieter voice. “I know how it feels. At Kane. On this battleship, on this bridge, waiting for the snakes to break through, day after day.”
Gaiene regarded Kontos with a different gaze. The boy has been through a lot. It’s easy to forget. He doesn’t let the scars show very often. But they are there, aren’t they, lad? Sometimes, they fade with time. If you’re lucky. “That was an exceptional job you did at Kane, Kapitan-Leytenant Kontos. After that, this little operation should be easy. It either works very quickly, and we all celebrate, or it fails miserably, and we all very quickly die.”
Kontos smiled in turn and nodded, his eyes on Gaiene. “That is so. I will keep the battle cruiser’s commander entertained and his attention occupied. Let me know if there is anything I can do to assist your actions.”
“Just keep your citadels locked tight. We’ll take care of everything else this time.”
Kontos saluted with formal dignity, then the scene changed to an outside view.
“Just under an hour,” Gaiene told the soldiers of his brigade over the command circuit. “I want full-combat readiness in half an hour.”
Over the next forty-five minutes, Gaiene watched the battle cruiser swooping in, starting out as a flaring spot of light marked by the propulsion units straining to bring it to a halt relative to the battleship, then growing dramatically in size as it reduced speed, creating the illusion that the massive warship was expanding at an ever-slowing rate as it got closer.
“I never liked these boarding operations,” Lieutenant Colonel Safir commented from her location elsewhere in the battleship. The nearly one thousand soldiers they had brought with them were dispersed among four large loading docks spaced along the battleship’s hull. Fitting almost two hundred and fifty armored soldiers into each of those docks in such a way that almost all could engage attackers had taken some careful arranging despite the size of the compartments. “I’ve only done the one, and I don’t have fond memories.”
“We’ll enjoy this one more than they will,” Gaiene replied. The universe had long been a drab thing for him, illuminated only by the highs brought on by combat or alcohol or women. Memories could have provided more light and color, but along with the light and color came pain, so he did his best to block them out.
The ring on his left hand was concealed under the gauntlet of his battle armor, but he always knew it was there. Nothing else remained, but the ring did.
His spirit felt the lift that imminent battle carried before it, and for a moment, Gaiene could forget the emptiness he fought every day and the memories he fought to avoid every minute of every day.
The link to the battleship’s external sensors showed the battle cruiser looming very close now. “Five minutes,” the voice of Kapitan-Leytenant Kontos warned over the battleship’s announcing system. “Both Gryphon and Basilisk have broadcast acceptance of the offer from Haris and are altering vectors to join up with the battle cruiser!”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“THEY betrayed us?” Lieutenant Colonel Safir asked Gaiene.
“I doubt it.” Gaiene hoped he was right about that and about his evaluation of Kapitan Stein. When it came to judging women, or men for that matter, he wasn’t always successful.
Five minutes and four seconds later, the battle cruiser came to a stop relative to the battleship, only about fifty meters separating the sides of the two massive vessels. Openings suddenly gaped in the hull facing the battleship as the battle cruiser opened all four of its cargo hatches on this side, openings five meters high and ten meters wide, which were almost immediately obscured by a flurry of shapes coming out on trajectories aimed at where similar still-sealed hatches could be found on the outer hull of the battleship.
Gaiene and part of his brigade waited patiently behind one such hatch, other portions of his brigade behind other hatches, close to a thousand soldiers in full battle armor with weapons at ready. He would have liked to have more, but one freighter could only carry so many (life support had been almost overloaded on their way to the gas giant as it was), and a thousand should be enough.
“All scouts launch,” Gaiene ordered.
Clinging to the outside of the battleship’s hull where they had taken position half an hour ago were scouts in stealth armor, invisible to the attackers. At Gaiene’s command, those scouts pushed themselves toward the battleship, passing unseen through the oncoming ranks of the Ulindi boarding party and toward the big hatches on the battle cruiser from which the attackers had come.
Spotting and counting objects was one of the things automated sensors were very good at. Within seconds, the battleship’s sensors reported the result. Seven hundred and twenty. “Almost half the crew of the battle cruiser,” Safir commented.
“Excellent,” Gaiene agreed.
The impacts of a bit more than seven hundred attackers coming to a halt on the battleship’s hull couldn’t be felt by humans in armor, but once again the battleship’s sensors reported the arrival of the boarding party, pinpointing the positions of all of them and passing that information on to the combat systems in the soldiers’ armor. Gaiene watched, feeling his excitement ramp up, enjoying what he knew would be brief sensations of being truly alive.
The attackers attached overrides to the hatch controls on the battleship. Other attackers waited nearby with breaching charges to use if necessary, but Gaiene knew those would not be needed. Kontos had set the hatch controls to yield easily to the hacking. He didn’t want his new battleship scratched up any more than necessary.
“Stand by,” Gaiene said, feeling a deepening awareness of his heart beating and his breath flowing in and out. His hands gripped his pulse rifle, feeling metal and composites and death under their touch. “Follow the assault plan. All units, weapons green.”
He knelt to provide a steadier aim, leveling his weapon at the hatch before him as it swung open. On either side of him, hundreds of other weapons came to bear on the hatch. The battleship hatches, burdened by much more armor than those of a battle cruiser’s hull, moved more slowly than those of the other warship but still opened with gratifying speed.
The attackers came swarming in at all four hatches in a coordinated assault that would have swamped the number of defenders expected aboard the battleship. Among the boarding party were only two squads of special forces in armor like that of Gaiene’s soldiers, heavily armed and trained for face-to-face combat. As was usually the case, the rest of the boarding party were crew from the battle cruiser in survival suits and carrying a variety of hand weapons. All of the attackers were expecting to face a meager number of defenders similarly lightly armed and lightly protected. As they entered the battleship, the attackers were forced to bunch up at the hatches, coming in from the top, the bottom, and both sides, silhouetted against empty space behind them, forming perfect targets.
Gaiene’s sight automatically zoomed in on his target, a single figure in a survival suit, clean and clear and bright in the rifle’s sight. He forgot everything else for a moment, forgot the past, forgot the pain, felt only the unholy joy of having a clean shot and a powerful weapon and the sensation of his hand tightening as his finger squeezed the trigger, then the shock as the weapon fired and the target jerked from the impact of a hit that blew open the suit and tore a hole through the chest of the unfortunate man or woman who wore it.
He instinctively sought a second target, but the rest of his soldiers had opened fire at the sam
e moment as their colonel, and there were very few targets left.
Of the seven hundred twenty attackers in the boarding party who had tried to board through the four cargo hatches, over six hundred died in the first volley.
“Forward!” Gaiene shouted.
As the survivors of the attack force tried to gather their wits, Gaiene’s thousand hurled themselves forward, overrunning and annihilating the remnants of the attackers, then launching themselves without hesitating into open space toward the battle cruiser.
Fifty meters is not a large distance, even when measured against the standards of a planet’s surface. In space, it is nothing, unless it is the distance between you and safety, between you and your target, between life and death. Men and women who had literally jumped off one ship to hurl themselves toward the other crossed that fifty meters in only a few seconds that felt much, much longer. Sufficiently alert sentries in the battle cruiser’s cargo holds could have seen them coming, could have slammed shut the outer hatches in that brief time available, possibly giving the battle cruiser time to accelerate away before the soldiers could breach those outer hatches.
But the few sentries posted at the battle cruiser’s outer hatches were all dead and dying, slain by Gaiene’s scouts, whose presence the guards had never suspected until too late.
Gaiene felt a dizzy sense of elation and disorientation as a brief stretch of star-littered space flew past, infinity on all sides, the hull of the battleship forming an armored wall behind him and that of the battle cruiser an expanse before him, the cargo-loading dock that was his objective growing very quickly before him as if he were falling into it. He barely had time to override the panicked reaction of his instincts, keeping his sense of orientation—It is ahead of me, not beneath me—then he had plummeted inside the loading dock he had aimed for on the battle cruiser, landing with a practiced ease that kept him on his feet, weapon ready for immediate use. His soldiers had varying amounts of experience with the maneuvers required to leap from one artificial gravity field through a gap of zero gravity and land in another artificial gravity field. Some kept their feet like Gaiene, some skidded to a running halt, and others tumbled, rolling along the deck before scrambling to their feet. The least experienced hit hard, flailing, disoriented and confused by the abrupt shifts in where up and down were.
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