by Terry Mixon
He took a sip of the coffee he’d filled with alcohol.
“You signed on for a revolution?” Falcone asked, her voice disbelieving.
“No, I was one of the stupid ones,” he admitted flatly. “I signed on to an anti-piracy fleet. They sold me a hard bill of goods, Agent. They needed someone with carrier experience, and Fleet wasn’t downsizing the carriers or the cruisers.”
“So, you trained the enemies of the Commonwealth,” she said.
“Yes,” he agreed. “By that point, I knew what I was doing, too,” he said levelly. “But by the time I was out here aboard Longbow, they told me what would happen if I tried to quit. Or sell them out. Only way out of the Cadre is a body bag, Agent Falcon, and my family would be in bags too.
“They tried to keep the Independence ships’ hands clean, but the officers all had to know what we were in for. Blackmail. Hostages. Money’s enough for some, and others they’d recruited as Independence turned out to be perfectly suited for the real Cadre.”
Michaels finished the coffee.
“They needed real officers and real crew,” he told Brad and Kate. “Drone carriers, destroyers…these aren’t ships you want regular pirates manning, and they aren’t ships regular pirates can crew. And they only have so many ‘true’ Cadre to go around.”
“Where in Everdark are they even getting the ships?” Brad asked. “I know where every Bound-class ship went, yet I’ve taken down two in Cadre colors.”
“The cuts help cover what they’re doing,” Michaels said quietly, “but they’re not getting surplus ships. Longbow and Trebuchet were never Fleet carriers. The destroyer squadrons? They were never Fleet ships.”
Two carriers. That was what that set of names meant. The Cadre had two Everdarkened carriers.
Well, one now, Brad realized with a cold smile.
“What were they?” he demanded.
“Clean build,” Michaels told him. “I was one of the first people to ever set foot aboard this ship, Commodore. She deserved better than what the Cadre made her.” He sighed. “The officers and men who became the Independence Militia deserved better, too, but enough of them have just plain given up that they’re a lost cause.”
“Am I understanding you correctly, Commander Michaels?” Falcone demanded, her voice very cold and very still. “Are you saying that one of Fleet’s suppliers is knowingly building warships for the Cadre?”
“I imagine a lot of it’s covered by orders from the Independence Militia, and I bet at least some of it looks like legitimate Fleet construction orders…but the guys at the corporate head offices have got to know,” he confirmed. “Two carriers that I know of. Twenty-three destroyers. Forty corvettes.
“That’s the Independence Militia’s strength. Some of those ships are truly Cadre. The rest…” He sighed. “We’re Cadre too; we’re just not fanatics. I don’t even know what those fuckers have to be fanatics about.”
“That’s treason. That’s…worse than treason,” Falcone said.
“Which yard?” Brad asked.
“I don’t know,” the Cadre officer replied. “What do I know? I know that they had enough damned cutouts that they’ve used the same delivery location every time. I took delivery of Trebuchet for the Cadre—we always covered the swap-over with a carrier or Lioness.”
“You can tell us where?” Brad demanded.
“I can tell you where,” he confirmed. “I can tell you when—there’s another delivery coming up, and from the rumors I’ve heard, we’re expecting another carrier.
“And if you’ll trust me, I can give you a face and a voice they know. I’ve made the pickups before. The Cadre may know I’m dead or turned…but there’s too many cutouts in place for the yard folks to know that.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Whatever her actual provenance and intended crews, Longbow had been built to a Commonwealth Fleet template. The Spearthrower-class carriers had been designed as task group flagships, so they had some of the best virtual conferencing gear Brad had ever seen.
It put the extraordinarily expensive suite he’d installed in Oath of Vengeance to shame, but it let him pull all of his senior officers into a conference as they considered their next move.
“I need full status reports, people,” he told them. “We have a unique opportunity laid before us, but if trying to take advantage of it is suicide, we’ll hand it over to Fleet.”
None of his officers looked happy at that idea. Brad hadn’t hired anyone who didn’t want to stick it to the Cadre.
Jason Finley shook his head. Brad’s old tactical officer looked exhausted but determined.
“We’ve patched up everything on Heart that can be patched,” he said firmly. “We ran out of replacement reactive armor strips, but we’ve got at least a basic layer over the entire ship. Couple of weak spots, but I do generally try not to get hit.”
“Can we reallocate spares from the other ships or Longbow?” Brad asked. He was pretty sure he knew the answer, but he figured he’d ask.
“Cross-compatibility from the larger ships’ armor is…mixed at best,” Michelle told him. “If we went through everyone’s stockpiles, we could probably find some pieces small enough to fit, but that could tie up our engineering department for days—and we’ve always got better things for the engineers to do.”
“We’re fine,” Finley added. “A little thin in places, but like I said: our first defense is not getting hit. It’s usually easier.”
The two corvettes that had survived to engage Brad’s people had been nasty pieces of work with big engines and heavy torpedo armaments. They’d lasted a lot longer against two destroyers and two corvettes than he’d expected, and hammered his ships hard before Michaels’s betrayal had taken them out.
“Alan-a-dale is in about the same state as Heart,” Jace Olhouser noted. “We’re down a torpedo tube—there’s no way we’re getting the starboard tube put back together outside a shipyard—but our armor is in better shape than Heart.”
Brad nodded and glanced at his wife and Captain Andre. “Our destroyers?”
“Bound by Law never even entered their range,” Andre told him. “In hindsight, we should have moved in closer before the penny dropped, and we might have kept the corvettes from getting hammered.”
“Probably not,” Michelle replied. “They ignored Oath, and we were dumping torpedoes and slugs into them right alongside the corvettes. Whoever was in command saw our weak spot and went for it, hard.”
“Not hard enough, thankfully,” Brad said. “From what Michaels said—and the radiation in the debris agrees with him—the bastards had nukes. I guess he figured the drones were going to make up the difference.”
“If they hadn’t turned on him, they would have,” Michelle said grimly. “When are you coming back aboard, Brad? I’m not entirely comfortable having our CO—or my husband—on a Cadre ship we’re not entirely sure is trap-free.”
“Soon,” he promised. “But it all depends on what we decide to do, people. Kate? Brief ’em.”
The Commonwealth Agent nodded and stepped up to take over control of the briefing console. A map of the Solar System came up with a green icon flashing on it.
“Okay everyone. We’re here. The way back end of the Everdark and beyond. Turns out that part of why Longbow was here to refuel, specifically, is that the next place they were going was here.”
A red icon flashed up on the screen, even more in the back end of nowhere. If there was anything at the set of coordinates Michaels and Longbow’s computers had given them, it wasn’t in the Commonwealth databases.
“We’re just under three days from there. The nearest Fleet concentrations I know of are a minimum of four days away—and that would be them blasting through the area without slowing down. Great for scouting and okay for blowing things up, not so great if we want to capture ships.”
She smiled grimly.
“And believe me, we want to capture ships. In just over two and a half days, a convoy will reac
h that spot with the plan of rendezvousing with Longbow and her escorts. That convoy is from the Cadre’s supplier and will contain an unknown number of warships, but Michaels believes it will include a new heavy unit, almost certainly a carrier.”
Which was terrifying. The fact that the Cadre had one carrier had been a shock to Brad and everyone else. Two was a nightmare. Three…Brad didn’t have words for what the Cadre’s ability to acquire three carriers was.
At least he’d taken one away.
“While the Cadre knows that Longbow’s task group has been destroyed, we don’t know how close their nearest forces are. We, however, are in position to arrive, with the ship the convoy is expecting, less than twelve hours late.”
“You want us to fake being a Cadre pickup group?” Michelle asked. “That seems…doable. Oath might give the game away, though. She’s unique and the Cadre knows her.”
“The good news is that it doesn’t sound like the people dropping the ships off are Cadre,” Brad pointed out. “They work for the yards. We don’t know which yards, but capturing those ships should answer that question.
“According to Michaels, the suppliers bring three ships of their own: two escorts and a passenger liner to carry their transit crews. Usually, the Cadre pickup team will tow the ships to a second location the suppliers don’t know about, where they will meet Cadre crews.”
He shook his head.
“Most of those crews are ‘Independence Militia’ with Cadre commanders,” he told his people. “They got themselves a shit deal, but there’s nothing we can do for them. Everlit, the information security these guys are running is hard enough that Michaels was the third officer on this carrier and can’t give us the coordinates of a ‘Militia’ base.”
“Because that shouldn’t be a huge warning sign for the idiots who signed on,” Olhouser grumped.
“Make no mistake,” Brad warned Olhouser, “I’ve got some sympathy for how deep the bastards have dug themselves, but I doubt there’s an ‘Independence Militia’ ship out there without innocent blood on their hands. The Cadre will have made damn sure of that.”
“Their existence means we’re prepared to consider surrenders and the Agency may cut deals with them,” Falcone told the mercenaries, “but they are at best enemy combatants. Clear?”
“Clear,” Alan-a-dale’s commander said with a pleased expression.
“I think Oath will be less of a problem than we think,” Brad continued. “Or, at least, no more of a problem than having one more destroyer than Longbow’s original group causes, anyway. We’ll follow along behind everyone else stealthily while Longbow and the rest of our ships close.
“While there are only passage crews aboard the ships, we’re almost certainly outmassed and outgunned by the convoy. We want them to hand the ships over and get back onto their transport home.
“Then you punch out the escorts and Oath makes an assault approach on the transport, getting close enough to guarantee clean landings for Saburo’s people.”
“What about my teams?” Doary asked.
“I need you to stay on Longbow,” Brad admitted. “Crewing her is going to be the biggest problem out of this.”
“Not really,” Falcone noted. “If the Militia crew want amnesty? They can bloody well earn it by flying the ship into battle for us—with Major Doary’s troopers holding guns to their backs, just in case.”
The surviving crew from Longbow had been locked into their own quarters after Brad’s people had swept them for surprises and overridden the locking mechanisms. The codes might not be the same ones Fleet used, but the mechanisms were the same—and Fleet allowed for the possibility of house arrest for anyone, apparently.
Brad did the Cadre officer the courtesy of knocking before he and Falcone entered, though they didn’t wait for a response.
Michaels was sitting in a chair, reading an old-style paperback with several exploding spaceships on the cover. He laid the book aside as they came in and looked at them levelly.
“I’d say mi casa es su casa, Commodore, but Everdark…what was my ship is now your salvage. How can I help you?”
“I’m just here to pitch the plan,” Brad told him with a chuckle, gesturing toward Falcone. “Agent Falcone is the one who can help you.”
The third officer’s quarters on a Fleet capital ship were quite luxurious to Brad’s merchant-raised and mercenary-trained mind. There was a lounge area with a couch and several chairs, one of which Falcone took over as she sat down and studied Michaels in silence.
“Agent, Commodore…” Michaels held up his hands, palms up. “I’ll argue for my people and I’ll argue for my family, but I know damn well what I walked into and I know damn well what I’ve done.
“My reasons seemed good enough at the time, but I’m at best a privateer and a traitor—and at worst, a pirate, a murderer, and arguably a spy in time of war.” He grimaced. “Do I just about summarize the charges, Agent Falcone?”
The spy chuckled. There wasn’t much humor in the sound.
“Honestly, I think you might be overselling it,” she noted. “Both spy and time of war would be hard to convince a judge to buy into. I probably wouldn’t even try for murderer. Pirate and traitor is enough to shoot you, and I promised I wouldn’t do that.”
“A mercy I seem to recall promising to earn,” he replied. “You have full access to this ship. If you have questions about the Cadre, I’ll answer as best as I can. I warn you, though, even the ‘trusted’ Independence officers were…second-class so far as the Cadre was concerned.”
“Oh, you and I are going to be having some long, long conversations over the next couple of days,” Falcone promised. “For now, though, Commodore Madrid has a plan. One for which he could use more hands on deck.”
“Hands, I would guess, familiar with Longbow?” Michaels guessed.
“You may be too smart for your own good,” the spy told him.
The redheaded man sighed.
“You were kind enough to give me a list of the survivors,” he reminded them. “Fifty-one people other than me. There are four I suggested, strongly, that Colonel Saburo keep under very close watch. All four were under sedation at the time, so I imagine that wasn’t difficult.”
“And the rest?” Falcone asked carefully.
“Are all various degrees of fucked,” Michaels confirmed. “I won’t plead innocence on any of their parts now, but we got suckered into this and trapped. We just didn’t see a way out, either.”
“I do,” she told him. “Is forty-eight people enough to fly this ship, Commander?”
He waved a hand in the air.
“We could fly her with that. Probably even deploy the drones. That’s it. We’d need more to man the weapons or even run half-assed damage control.”
“But you could fly this ship up to your rendezvous with the incoming ship convoy and make them think you’re aboveboard?” Falcone asked.
“Figured that was what you wanted,” he agreed, and sighed. “Yeah, probably. You’d have to trust me with the coms and I’m guessing you’d have an entire damn platoon of guns watching us like hawks, but we could make it happen.”
“If it goes wrong, you just said you can’t run the ship’s defenses,” Brad said quietly. “You’d be sitting ducks.”
Michaels shrugged.
“That’s the game, Commodore. You put the right prize on the table and let me talk to them, and I think I can get you a skeleton crew for this ship.”
“The prize is amnesty, Commander,” Falcone said calmly. “If you fight for the Commonwealth, I’ll take you at your word that you got trapped in this, and you all get sent home with your records expunged. Play nice, and we’ll swing the whole lot of you into witness protection, with your families.”
The Cadre officer studied his hands for a long time in silence.
“Yeah, okay,” he said quietly. “Let me talk to my people? I’m in, to the end of the damn line, whatever it takes. But I can’t speak for them.”
&nbs
p; “Are you prepared to give Commodore Madrid your parole?” Falcone asked.
He snorted.
“My parole? Everdarkened void, for a chance to get out of this room, save my people, and stick a knife in the Cadre’s eye? I’d swear my undying allegiance.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Brad gathered with Doary, Saburo, and Falcone at the airlock. The shuttles were waiting to take most of his people back to their ships, along with their wounded and the half-dozen prisoners from Longbow who either Michaels didn’t trust or had refused the offer.
“Do you trust Michaels?” Brad asked Falcone.
“Enough that I’m staying on this ship with him and, oh, thirty men and women with guns,” the spy replied. “I’m a big girl, Brad; I can handle knives in the dark better than you can.”
Saburo coughed.
“You have seen the boss fight, right?” the Colonel asked.
“He’s a brilliant swordsman, but he’s not a back-alley knife fighter,” Falcone told him. “That’s my field, and if Michaels tries to turn on us, he’ll regret it.”
“I don’t see it,” Brad admitted. “If there was a chance he could run and get away, sure, but we’re in the middle of nowhere, heading for a convoy that no one is supposed to know exists. It’s easy to give a man rope when you can see everywhere he can run with it.”
“Exactly,” Falcone agreed. “That’s a man who wants to believe he has honor left but knows exactly what he became. But give him nowhere to run and the ability to screw over the people who screwed him, and he’ll make them bleed.”
“Speaking as the woman charged with making sure he doesn’t knife us in the back, I like that idea,” Doary noted. “I’d like to see my fiancée again when this is over!”
“That’s the plan for everyone,” Brad agreed. “Forty-eight hours, people. That’s all. Stick that out and we can cut off the Cadre’s supply line.”
“Everlit, I don’t care if they manage to get every damn ship in this convoy somehow,” Falcone noted. “If we can pin the ships to somebody, I’m going to nail them to a wall.”