by Terry Mixon
“Let’s hope,” Saburo said grimly. “But let’s remember—these guys managed to build carriers without being caught. They’ve got allies back home. That should never have happened, no matter what bribes they were paying.”
“I know,” Falcone said. “And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the string I intend to yank and see what unravels—wherever it leads.”
Somehow, Brad wasn’t sure they were going to like what they found if they yanked on that string. Every time he thought he had a handle on what the Cadre was and what their objectives were, something else came up.
He was wrestling a snake in the dark, and he was starting to be grimly certain the snake was actually an elephant’s trunk.
Michelle was waiting for Brad and Saburo as soon as they stepped off the shuttle. She somewhat pointedly saluted them both first before wrapping Brad into a tight embrace and looking over his shoulder at the ground force commander.
“Someday, Colonel, you and I need to convince this man that the Commodore’s place is not in the front lines of the boarding action,” she told him.
Brad couldn’t see his other subordinate, but he could imagine the shrug Saburo was giving her. He’d seen it before.
“You married him, ma’am,” Saburo pointed out. “You’ve got the levers. I just work for the man.”
Brad chuckled and shook his head as he and Michelle separated.
“I do try,” he said plaintively. “But my job is to be at the turning point, wherever that is.”
If the turning point was the command deck of Oath of Vengeance, that was where he belonged. If the turning point was a desperate boarding action across the decks of a carrier that shouldn’t exist, well, that was where he belonged.
“We brought enough bodies home this time to make me worry,” Michelle said quietly. “I know it’s the job, but…”
“But it hurts, every time,” Brad agreed. “Any updates on Oath?”
“She’s fine,” his wife told him. “We didn’t even take a scratch. We can go over details in your office.”
Saburo stepped around Brad and threw the Commodore a salute.
“I need to debrief my team leads,” the Colonel noted. “The op went about as smoothly as we could hope after the landing went sideways, but there’s always lessons to learn and things to do better next time.”
“I would love to promise you that we will never attempt to board a Cadre carrier by crossing the refueling lines from a captured tanker again,” Brad told him. “Sadly, I can’t guarantee anything.”
“Life would be boring if you could,” Saburo replied. “And I’d hate for my troops to get bored. I’ll fill you in on what we come up with. After you ‘go over details in your office’ with the XO, of course.”
The wink he accompanied the last sentence with set both Brad and Michelle to blushing furiously. Brad was a mercenary flotilla commander, a reserve Fleet officer, a millionaire, and all that…but he was also under no illusions that the “briefing” with Michelle was probably going to end up exactly where Saburo was suggesting, either.
Rank hath its privileges, after all, and his office had a quite comfortable couch that Michelle had already insisted on “testing” a few times.
“All right, everyone,” Brad told his people the next morning. “We are officially committed to intercepting this convoy, so I hope everyone knows where to find their can of whoop-ass.” He grinned. “Because unless I’m misreading Agent Falcone’s face over there, we’re going to need them.”
“Ha. Ha,” the spy replied from the screen linked to Longbow. “I’ve spent most of the time since you returned talking to Commander Michaels, and I am not liking anything I’m hearing. Most of that’s general, though, not with regards to the convoy.”
She shook her head.
“Michaels has a pretty solid idea of the strength of this so-called Independence Militia the Cadre are using for heavy muscle, and it isn’t pretty. Sixty-five warships, people. Even with what they lost when we took Longbow, the Independence Militia has a third of the strength of the Commonwealth Fleet.”
Everyone on the video conference stopped. They hadn’t run the numbers like that. Fleet was down to about a hundred and eighty hulls after the cutbacks, so…yeah. She was right, Brad realized.
The Cadre was unquestionably the second most powerful military force in the star system.
“Hulls don’t tell you everything, though,” Andre objected. Law’s Captain looked shaky. “Fleet has cruisers, lots of ’em. They’ve been downsizing the destroyer and corvette strength, but all thirty cruisers are still in commission.”
Which was something the Cadre could never match. The Commonwealth had three battleships, eight carriers, and thirty cruisers as the core of that hundred and eighty ships. Brad exhaled a sigh of relief. Andre was right.
“Plus, if it came to a straight-up fight, the Guild and the Jovian flotillas would line up with Fleet,” he pointed out. “None of the Guild companies have a lot of ships, but between us and the various authorized security squadrons, we match this Independence Militia’s strength.”
“And how many other ships does the Cadre have?” Falcone asked softly. “We know about Lioness. We’re pretty sure that the Cadre doesn’t have any other cruisers, but Michaels has no idea what operates under direct Cadre command. Add in the pirates and assume that they can bring in the Outer System ships?”
She shook her head.
“Fleet can beat them, yes. But nothing else can. They’ve been quiet for eighteen months, and then suddenly they have an Everdarkened navy.”
“Where in Everdark did they come from?” Olhouser asked. “I guess…we know a chunk of that, between the Fleet drawdown and whatever yard is selling them ships—but where is the money coming from?”
“I don’t know,” Falcone replied. “Neither does Michaels. His salary cleared and no one blinked at any expense the ship needed, but the money flowed through the captain and XO, who were true-blood Cadre.
“So did a lot of navigation data,” she continued. “And it was being wiped from the ship’s computers on a regular basis. Unless we luck out and find someone’s pilot data pad like we did on Heart way back…we have no idea where their bases are.”
Brad snorted. That had been a fluke, and one that the Cadre associates they’d been dealing had moved Light and Dark to try and prevent. Of course, doing so had only drawn the Agency’s attention to his ship.
“So, this convoy is our best shot at tracking down anything,” he concluded aloud. “What do we know about it?”
“Quite a bit, thankfully,” Falcone replied. “Michaels has been on hand for four of these pickups. He knows the procedures, and while he doesn’t know most of the names, he’s spoken with several of the recurring players.”
A new screen lit up for the conference, showing a tactical plot with multiple icons.
“Generally, the Cadre or Independence Militia has arrived with four ships, one of them a carrier, to pick up eight ships,” she noted. “Upon arrival, the supplier transfers all of their personnel to a liner, kept well inside the cordon of both escorts and convoy until the very end.”
An icon on the screen flashed red.
“That transport is our primary target. We need it intact and we need prisoners. Secondary targets are these.”
Two icons, flanking the entire convoy, flashed a darker shade of red.
“Escorts. Every time Longbow has had this duty, they’ve been the same ships. Michaels figures the transport is the same ship too, but they’ve kept it well away from the Cadre ships.”
“If they’re the same ships, do we have specs on them?” Brad asked.
“Lancer-class destroyers,” she said. “It’s not a type I’m familiar with, to be honest.”
Brad leaned back in his chair, sharing a smile with his wife as everyone looked to him to see what he knew. His childhood obsession had become an extraordinarily useful adult skill that he kept up as best as he could.
“You wouldn’t be,”
he noted. “Fleet never picked up the design. Like the Bound class”—he nodded to Andre—“they’re specialized ships. In this case, escort destroyers. They have no torpedo launchers at all. No heavy guns, either. Just a lot of gatling drivers.
“Getting torpedoes through their guns to hit their charges or them is pretty damn hard. Fortunately, we have Bound by Law, so we don’t need to get torps through their screen.”
He shook his head.
“They’re not common, but there’s enough of them out there that no one is going to blink at them, either,” he concluded. “Lots of corps have them for convoy security, and there’s at least a dozen flying Guild company colors. They’re about as common as any design Fleet never bought into.”
“Makes sense, all told. They don’t want to attract attention to this convoy—and it’s pretty attention-grabbing as it is,” Falcone told them. “Generally between six and eight warships each time. The supplier drops them off and the Cadre tows them to a second rendezvous point that does change each time, where another transport is waiting with crew.
“Michaels doesn’t know where that rendezvous is this time, sadly. The Cadre is going to send someone to complete the handover ASAP, which means our time is limited.”
“We come in fat, dumb, and happy,” Brad told everyone. “Oath will be under stealth, sweeping in behind to make sure the transport doesn’t get away. The rest of you will play Longbow’s escorts and try to get in as close as you can.
“We want them off those ships and onto the transport,” he concluded. “If we can get them to complete the handover without blinking, that’s our best-case scenario.
“Worst case, Bound by Law should be able to open the dance with the destroyers and either destroy them or take out enough of their guns to allow torpedo strikes from the corvettes. The convoy ships will only have passage crews, so they won’t have the hands to fight.
“If we take out the escorts and capture the transport, the rest of them should fall into line under our guns—and then we can hand the damn ships over to the Commonwealth as proof of what’s going on.”
Saburo snorted.
“Can we keep some if we get that far?” he asked. “I mean, no one expects to get to keep the carrier, but hey! Free warships!”
“We’ll talk to Fleet when the time comes,” Brad hedged. He’d love to double his company’s hulls at the Cadre’s expense, but he wasn’t going to assume the Commonwealth would let him keep what he “reclaimed” from the Cadre, either.
“Any questions, people?” he asked.
Chapter Thirty
The clock continued to tick toward their rendezvous with the Cadre convoy. Part of Brad felt there should be something more dramatic than a simple timer, given just how important the operation could end up being.
But all they had was the timer showing they were sixteen hours away. According to their intelligence, the convoy should be arriving at the rendezvous point in the next eight hours, and Brad had made sure all of his people were going to get at least eight hours of rest before the penny dropped.
Oath was already vectoring away from the rest of the Vikings, the big destroyer’s heat sinks online and radar baffling extended. They were venting her heat away from the convoy, into hopefully empty space. Combined with the heat sinks themselves, that should give them at least forty-eight hours of near-invisibility from their target.
“Still no sign of the convoy,” he noted aloud. He was alone on Oath’s bridge, but he had a laser link to Longbow, where Falcone had taken over the captain’s office. “Think Michaels is pulling a fast one?”
“Part of me is inclined to think so,” the spy admitted. “He is a Cadre officer, after all, whatever his reasons or cause. But…no. I don’t think so. I’m guessing we’re looking at another of those damn heat umbrellas.”
“Where did those even come from?” Brad asked. “I’ve never heard of anything like them.”
“Take a guess,” Falcone said with a sigh.
“Fleet R&D project killed just after prototyping?” he asked. That was where several pieces of illicit gear he’d acquired schematics for had come from, after all.
“Bingo. I’m starting to question if any of our R&D is actually for Fleet, or if it’s all being done for the Everdarkened Cadre.”
The mercenary winced.
“It can’t be that bad, can it?” he asked.
“No, it’s not,” she conceded with a sigh. “Invictuses like the corvettes we keep running into are a Fleet design, with the latest and greatest in tech and gear. The fact that the Cadre seems to have as many of them as Fleet does, though…”
“You sound like that’s taking you unpleasant places,” Brad noted.
“I’ve pretty much drained Michaels’s brain dry,” Falcone said. “The Cadre has done a good job of keeping this Independence Militia of theirs in the dark and fed shit, but there’s a limit to how much you can hide from the third officer of one of your major ships.
“Plus, well, they figured they had him pretty well trapped. His family under their thumb and they’d dragged him into enough crimes to guarantee his execution if captured? They trusted him as much as they trusted anyone who wasn’t fully inside.”
“I’m guessing we’ve got the answers to some of our age-old questions? Like where the hell does a pirate organization get dozens of ships and entire brigades of disposable shock troops?” Brad asked.
The attack on Blackhawk Station that had ended several of his officers’ corporate careers, killed his old XO, and cost him his original arm had involved over ten thousand ground troops. Most of them hadn’t made it aboard the station, but there’d been a lot of questions over where they had come from.
“None of those answers are pretty, Brad,” she admitted. “The Cadre is recruiting from the Fleet and Marines as we draw down. They’re buying ships from Fleet’s own suppliers, and no one is even blinking.
“And, from some of Michaels’s reading between the lines, they basically own a good chunk of the Outer System and are basically just conscripting ground troops as needed.”
Brad winced.
“That doesn’t work for modern troops,” he noted.
“It doesn’t work for commandos or ship crew,” Falcone replied. “If all you need is warm bodies to fling at the defenses, like what they were bringing to Blackhawk?” She shook her head. “There’s thousands of years of history of how to turn conscripts into mostly obedient killing machines. I imagine the Phoenix has access to all of it.”
“I really hope I get to introduce him to the same fate as the Terror,” Brad said grimly. One of the unpleasant discoveries of their last big victory over the Cadre had struck close enough to home that he hadn’t even told Falcone. The Terror had been related to him. The man who’d killed the uncle who’d adopted him had, apparently, also been an uncle.
“You’ve more reason than you think,” the spy said. Her face slid to one side of the monitor and a picture appeared on the other half. “Turns out the Phoenix has been aboard Longbow a few times. They did a good job of purging the visuals of him, but not a good-enough job.
“Michaels wouldn’t have had a clue who he was, but I recognized him instantly.”
Brad hissed as he recognized the Phoenix as well. The hair was shorter, more professional and in a military style now, and he wore an armored vac-suit with a gold-and-red phoenix blazon instead of the business suits he’d encountered the man in before, but it was unquestionably Jack Mader.
The man had once been an assistant to the Governor of Io. He’d also been a key component in the slaver organization Brad had ripped apart, and a major player in the Cadre’s operations already.
Apparently, the Terror’s death had earned him a promotion.
“Fuck,” Brad finally said. “Mader.”
“Yeah. He’s a damned bad penny, keeps showing up. I’m glad I stopped at this picture to study it longer, though,” Falcone told him.
“Why?”
The figure to Mader’s right
was suddenly surrounded in a golden aura that allowed Brad to make out the woman’s face.
“Because while you and I know Mader, I know this woman,” Falcone said quietly. “And she shouldn’t be aboard a Cadre warship—not least because she’s dead.”
“And who is she?” Brad asked as he studied the stranger’s face. She was an older woman, with sharp features but seemingly warm blue eyes.
“Ten years ago, before she died in a shuttle accident, that was Senator Jessica Andrews of Australia,” the spy told him. “She was a senior member of the main opposition party of the Commonwealth Senate at the time and a key player in a number of committees on Fleet and the Agency.
“If she’s alive and she’s with the Cadre, then my biggest question is starting to look very, very terrifying.”
“Which one’s that?” the mercenary asked as he studied the supposedly dead woman.
“Where the money that funds the Cadre is coming from,” Falcone told him. “And the answer is starting to look like it’s coming from the Commonwealth itself…and I do not understand why.”
Kate Falcone’s words were still echoing in Brad’s head when he returned to his and Michelle’s quarters to get his own eight hours of sleep before everything. His wife was getting ready to head out herself, but something in his movements made her stop and study him.
“All right, love,” she said briskly after a moment. “You look like you just found out your dog died, and we don’t even have a dog.”
Dogs were a bad idea on ships. They’d talked about a cat. Brad wasn’t sure of the point of a pet—and wasn’t entirely comfortable risking a helpless small animal aboard a warship, in any case—but he also knew he wasn’t going to win the argument in the long run. He wasn’t even fighting a particularly valiant rear-guard action anymore.
“Kate has been questioning Michaels since we left,” he told her. “And going through Longbow’s files. We now know who the Phoenix is.”