“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 the 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.
Ether checked the station readings: integrity was solid 100’s across the board. So, it wasn’t a breach. She stepped back to check the security screens, and on number 6, she could see that one of the FCDC guards was down, holding his leg. On the bottom of the screen, the guard’s bio readouts showed him to be alive, but in shock and pain.
“Did he fall over his own feet?” Sergeant Ganesh asked.
Gunny Medicine Crow beat Esther to the screen, swiping a 60-second repeat. The guard’s image appeared, with him slowly walking his post. He walked about 15 meters or so, then turned around. He paused for a second, and just as he started to move again, he fell to the ground, clutching his knee.
“First Team, out with me. Take cover and keep your eyes peeled. Second, cover the entrance,” gunny told her section.
“Wha—” Esther started to ask, but then bit it off. The gunny wasn’t hesitating, and if she thought she needed to move so aggressively, she didn’t need her commander on her butt demanding an explanation. For a moment she wanted to follow First Team out, but she knew her place was right there at their mini-command center.
“Captain, what’s going on?” Dr. Tantou passed through the station’s sound system.
“Stay in the lab, Doctor,” Esther told him. “We’ve got a situation out here.”
“What kind of situation?”
“I don’t have time now. Stay off the net,” she said.
If I knew myself, maybe I’d tell you.
She looked back on the visuals. The gunny was leading her team, advancing in full tactical mode. Two of the IS guards, carrying the downed guard, met them at the corner of the station. The gunny had two of her team provide cover while t
he rest of them hustled the first guard to the airlock.
The gunny obviously thought this was an assault of some sort, but Esther didn’t know why. It looked like the guard had twisted his knee somehow. She checked the surveillance drones, both the Marine dragonflies and the Navy drones, but there was nothing showing up that triggered any kind of alarm.
The front airlock was cycling, so Esther left the screens and waited at the door. When it opened, the three IS guards and three Marines stepped inside, and it was immediately evident what had happened. Spec Alfayed had taken a round in his knee. The joint was destroyed.
“Lay him down right there,” Esther said, pointing to the deck right by the door.
Everyone coming through the airlock was hit with both a chemical wash and IR to remove the residuals of the outside atmosphere. But Alfayed had been shot in the knee, and that would have brought the poison into his body. He was contaminated, and the station’s life support systems didn’t need the extra load.
“Dr. Williams, please come out here now. Specialist Alfayed has been shot,” Esther passed to the Allied Biologicals scientist who was doubling as their medical officer.
“Sergeant De Vries, get the decon kit off the bulkhead. Sergeant Ganesh, get the Porto. Tell them we’ve got one WIA. We’re going to need a CASEVAC, but right now, I want them to run a trace and find out who did this.”
Within moments, Dr. Williams entered, Dr. Tantou in tow. He assessed the wound, then started injecting the decon foam right into the wound. Spec Alfayed grimaced, squeezing Spec 5 Holsom’s hands.
The airlock cycled again, and the other two Marines, along with SFC Juarez came in.
The FCDC team leader rushed forward, asking, “Is Farouk going to be OK?”
“He’s got some regen time ahead of him,” the doctor said. “But he’ll be fine.”
“Hear that, F-man? You’re going to be fine,” Spec 5 Holsom told him.
Esther's Story: Special Duty (The United Federation Marine Corps' Lysander Twins Book 4) Page 8