“Aye, aye, sir,” Laskowski responded woodenly, for the first time sensing that all might not go as she had planned. Without another word from L’Houillier, she turned to the operations section and began barking out the Grand Admiral’s orders, feeling not so much resentment as a growing sense of fear as they fought to reorganize the fleet.
Slowly, ever so slowly, the three huge task forces began to change their shape, from the roughly conical formations in which they had arrived to a series of great staggered wedges, their courses altered to bring as many batteries to bear on the enemy as possible.
L’Houillier watched the tactical display with his fists knotted at his sides. He had agreed to Zhukovski’s plan, but he was determined to fight his fleet as long as there was some possibility of victory. Even the crippling of the Kreelan fleet would suffice, if it were not at the cost of his own.
On the great screen, the number of engagements doubled, then trebled. The Kreelans were fighting back, but weakly. L’Houillier allowed himself a faint ray of hope. There was every chance that his fleet would inflict far more damage on the enemy than they themselves would sustain.
Perhaps, he thought, we might even win.
***
Zhukovski was beginning to feel the chill of panic rising in his throat. The corridor that ran through the outer hull and separated two banks of massive storage rooms was empty. Where the devil was Braddock? he wondered. “You can think of nowhere he might be found?” he asked Enya again.
“No, admiral,” she said, equally worried. “He said he would meet us here, as agreed. He only wanted to speak with Nicole, to wish her luck on her mission, before he met with us.”
Zhukovski’s head whipped around. “Mission?” he snapped. “What mission? Carré was not to fly. Personal orders of Grand Admiral himself after she ferried a fighter aboard. Chyort voz’mi,” he cursed. “Come! We check her cabin.”
“But that’s all the way across the ship!”
“You have better idea?” he asked over his shoulder. “Come! We waste precious time.”
Unable to think of any alternative, Enya rushed after him. Her footsteps were lost in the cascade of godlike hammer blows that was Warspite’s batteries engaging the enemy.
***
“Sarge,” one of the guards whispered, “look.”
Sergeant Ricardo Estefan, ISS, looked up to see Nicole Carré step through the blast doors and into the brig. She brought with her a large flight bag, obviously full, and she was wearing a strange expression.
Standing up, he said, “I’m sorry, ma’am, but the president ordered that no one – especially you – be allowed to see the pris–”
His sentence was interrupted by the bark of the blaster that suddenly appeared in Nicole’s free hand. Set on stun, it was still powerful enough to send the one hundred-kilo sergeant reeling against the wall, unconscious.
The four others on the guard detail were already reaching for their weapons, but Nicole was faster, much faster. In the blink of an eye, all four had been blasted to the floor, unconscious.
Working quickly, Nicole shut down the monitoring devices and entered the security override code she had coaxed from an ISS officer who had wanted a physical reward for the information. She had not disappointed him, although it had not been what he had been expecting. He still lay unconscious and bleeding in his cabin.
With a hum, the mantrap began to cycle open. The force field within had been shut down completely.
Shera-Khan and Tesh-Dar emerged from the opening, Nicole wondering how the two had squeezed themselves into the tiny chamber.
“Sergeant Estefan,” a belligerent voice suddenly spat from the control panel. “I’m not getting a reading from your monitors, and I show that the mantrap’s been opened. What’s going on?”
“Where is Reza?” she asked Shera-Khan urgently, as she took an electronic key from one of the unconscious guards and removed their explosive collars. The door to the mantrap slowly began to cycle back into the cell. Too slow, too slow! she thought frantically. She could see in her mind the two Kreelan warriors and herself exposed and vulnerable out here, with Reza trapped in the revolving cylinder as a dozen ISS guards burst in, shooting.
“He remains within,” the boy replied.
Nicole saw that Tesh-Dar seemed to have regained something close to what must be her awesome natural strength, as she moved immediately toward the door to the corridor to watch for intruders, her muscles rippling beneath the leatherite armor. Without a word, she jammed a sliver of metal she had taken from somewhere in her armor into the door slot. It would not be closing on them unless they wanted it to.
“Estefan!” the voice shouted. “Respond!”
“Come on, come on!” Nicole urged the maddeningly slow cylinder. She could just see the edge of the opening when the mantrap suddenly stopped turning.
“Security alert, Brig Four!” the voice bleated over the ship’s intercom. “ISS detachments to the brig, on the double! Intruder alert! Intruder alert!”
“Merde!” Nicole hissed. She tried the code again, but the controls had been overridden, probably somewhere in engineering, and she did not know enough about the systems to try a manual override. Behind her, the motors driving the door to the brig whined in futility against the metal Tesh-Dar had wedged in the doorway, trying to prevent their escape. “He is trapped! We have to–”
Her jaw went slack as she watched Reza walk through the ten centimeter-thick chromalloy of the mantrap, his body passing through the metal as if it were not there at all. The explosive collar was already gone from around his neck. She had no idea how he could have removed the otherwise foolproof device.
Before she could say anything, Reza said something to Shera-Khan, who immediately rushed to Tesh-Dar’s side, a shrekka clutched in his claws.
“We must go,” Reza told Nicole, taking her by the arm.
“Reza… wait,” she managed, gesturing toward the flight bag. In a way, what she had seen did not surprise her; she knew from her dreams that – in his world, anyway – such miracles were possible. But here, now…
Without waiting for her to explain, Reza opened the flight bag. He knew instinctively that she would not have brought it without good reason, and sensed her confusion at what she had just witnessed. But explanations would have to wait. For all the infinite age of the Universe, they were running out of time.
Inside he saw the deep black of his Kreelan armor and, beneath that, the glittering of his weapons. His sword.
“In Her name,” he whispered. Looking up, he said, “Thank you, Nicole.”
“You are… welcome, mon ami,” she said as he hastily stripped out of his uniform and donned what long ago had been his second skin. He had made crude adjustments to it over the years, and while it did not fit as it should, as the clawless ones would have made it, it was still comfortable. It felt right.
In less time than Nicole could believe, Reza was ready. With but a proud glance at her adopted son, Tesh-Dar moved quickly into the corridor, one of the guards’ weapons clutched in her huge hand, her own weapons locked away in a security vault somewhere else in the ship.
When she signaled it was clear, Reza asked Nicole, “Where are we to go?”
“The only place we can get transportation off the ship,” Nicole said, leading Reza into the corridor, her own weapon held before her. “Hangar deck.”
***
After ringing at Nicole’s cabin and receiving no answer, Zhukovski opened the door with his command override.
The door slid open to reveal Tony Braddock sprawled in Nicole’s bunk.
“Tony!” Enya gasped as the two of them rushed into the room, the admiral closing the door behind him after casting a wary eye about the corridor to make sure no one had noticed them.
To be discovered now would be disaster, he muttered to himself. Around them, Warspite shuddered and boomed as the battle raged. Good luck, my friend, he silently wished L’Houillier.
“What happened?” Enya
demanded as she shook Braddock back to consciousness.
“Nicole…” he rasped, “stunned me.”
“Why, councilman?” Zhukovski demanded. “Why would she do this? What does she plan to do?”
“Reza,” Enya knew the answer instantly. “She’s gone to free him, hasn’t she?”
Braddock nodded stiffly. He felt like someone was pricking him with a million needles. The feeling was not exactly painful, but it was hardly pleasant, either. “That must be it,” he managed, shaking his head to clear it. His vision gradually began to clear. He took a breath of air through his nose, trying to clean out the sharp smell of ozone that was a peculiar side effect of being stunned.
“We must stop her,” Zhukovski said. “They will know–”
“Security alert, Brig Four!” the ship’s intercom announced. “ISS detachments to the brig, on the double! Intruder alert! Intruder alert!”
“That tears it,” Braddock said, getting to his feet. He went over to a cabinet boasting a cipher lock, punched in some numbers, and opened it.
“What are you doing?” Enya asked.
Braddock withdrew two blasters. “Jodi was always paranoid that Nicole should have something to protect herself with,” he told them. “She gave these to her on her birthday a few years ago, and Nicole promised Jodi she would keep them with her.” He shook his head. “Nutcases, both of them. Thank God.”
After checking to make sure the weapons were loaded and carried a full charge, he handed one to Enya, keeping the other for himself. Zhukovski wore his own sidearm.
Zhukovski opened the door, leading the other two out into the corridor. “Where do you think she will go?” he asked Braddock.
“Where else would a pilot go?” he replied. “Hangar deck.”
***
Nicole had led Reza and the others through a maze of passageways and service tunnels to avoid being spotted by the alerted security teams and the damage repair crewmen whose duties required them to move through the ship while at battle stations. They were only a few yards from the last set of blast doors separating them from the hangar deck when Warspite shuddered and her metal body screamed in agony. The four of them were hurled against the bulkhead as the battleship recoiled under a direct hit, the already dim corridor lights flickering, dying.
Even as the echoes of the hit died away, Nicole could hear the sound of thunder beyond the blast door. The red tell-tales on the control panel told her all she needed to know.
“Hangar deck has been hit! It’s venting air to space!” she shouted above the howling of hangar deck’s air supply whirling away into vacuum on the other side of the bulkhead, just as the dim red emergency lights flickered on.
“Behind us!” Shera-Khan warned as several dim shapes appeared from the crimson murk of the corridor.
In the blink of an eye, a shrekka appeared in Tesh-Dar’s hand, its lethal blades already tearing into their target in the elder warrior’s mind. The muscles of her arm tensed in a pattern no less precise, yet infinitely more elegant, than any machine could have calculated.
Evgeni Zhukovski would have died had Reza not been an arrow’s breath faster than his priestess.
“He is a friend,” he told her as his hand gently touched her arm. He did not have to grab her or restrain her. She reacted instantly. Her arm relaxed. Slightly.
“Tony!” Nicole exclaimed, her face a mask of anguish as her husband embraced her. It had nearly killed her to stun him, but there was no way she could have explained what she had to do, and she did not want him to be associated with her crime. Then she noticed Zhukovski. “Admiral! What are you doing–”
“We have no time for unnecessary words, commander,” he cut her off. Nodding to Reza, then to the two Kreelans, he said, “After forty years in Navy was I ready to commit mutiny, commander. This day even that has gone awry. Now we are all fugitives, with no way to escape.” He gestured to the blast doors.
Warspite took another hit, worse this time. They found themselves curled up on the floor against the starboard bulkhead, a cloud of dust in the air from the shock.
Zhukovski noted with alarm that Warspite’s return fire was starting to lose its cadence, becoming more random, sporadic. Fire control was breaking down. “Flagship is hurt,” he told them. “Badly, I think.”
Reza felt a minute fluctuation in the artificial gravity. It was a very, very bad sign. “Engineering has sustained damage,” he told them. “Our warships” – Kreelan warships – “must be concentrating on Warspite. We must get away, and soon.” He turned to Nicole. “What is left on this ship that could get to the moon orbiting the Homeworld?”
“The captain’s gig, but that is all the way forward.”
“Then that is where we must go.”
“But Reza,” Nicole said, “we will have to go through the main corridors! There will be no way to avoid the security patrols.”
He glanced at Tesh-Dar, then turned to Nicole, his face a grim, alien mask. “They shall not stop us.”
“There may be another way,” Zhukovski growled. He stood at the wall, scrutinizing a miniature data display he held in his hand. Reza could see the trace of a smile, well hidden in the older man’s beard, shining in the crimson light of the battle lanterns. He looked like Satan himself. “Borge has sent for Golden Pearl, as I thought he would,” he told them. “He is abandoning ship.”
“If we could get to it first…” Enya mused. The thought sent a chill up her spine. They were actually trying to make their way to the enemy’s capital. But to do… what?
She shook her head. Whatever it was they were about to attempt, it was the only thing left that they could do.
“They are going to attempt docking at main gangway airlock,” Zhukovski repeated from the interface. “We have less than eight minutes to get there.”
“Let’s move it, then,” Braddock said gruffly.
Had Jodi been there, she would have recognized the voice of the hard-bitten gunnery sergeant who had looked after her on a backwater world, seemingly so long ago.
***
The battle was not going well, President Borge lamented angrily. He was furious at the failure of Grand Admiral L’Houillier and Warspite’s captain to keep the ship – and himself – safe from peril while annihilating the enemy. He would have had them both shot, but the second Kreelan salvo to penetrate Warspite’s failing shields had speared through the hull and destroyed the bridge. It was only a stroke of divine intervention that Borge had been in his private quarters, watching the battle develop with the Confederation’s chief leaders: his own subordinates.
“I’m sorry, Mr. President,” Laskowski reported over the comm unit that Borge held in his hand. “The reports are true. Ships throughout the fleet are picking up gravity spikes: more Kreelan ships are inbound.” Her face was blackened and bloodstained. She happened to have been on her way back from the intel section to the flag bridge when the latter was blasted into wreckage. Had she passed through one more blast door on her short journey, she would have been dead. Like L’Houillier and the others. This was the worst moment in her life, the most difficult thing she had ever done. “I suggest we withdraw, sir. Immediately.”
Borge’s face flushed red on its way to purple. “We will do no such thing, admiral!” he snapped viciously. “We are winning! Your own estimates,” he shook a handful of flimsies at the comm unit, “say so! We will return to Confederation space victorious or not at all,” he went on softly against the background of firing and periodic hits absorbed by Warspite’s thousands of tons of armor. “And if you or anyone else suggests such a traitorous idea again, I will have you shot. Do you understand, admiral?”
Laskowski choked back her fear. The honeymoon, it seemed, was over. “Yes, sir,” she replied carefully. “In that case, I request permission to transfer my flag to Southampton. Sir. Warspite will be untenable soon, and the flag bridge is gone.”
Borge grunted. Furious as he was, he could hardly deny that request as he made his own way to another
vessel to carry on his crusade, forging humanity’s future upon the ruins of the Empire. “Very well, admiral. Carry on.” With that, he snapped off the comm link. “Bloody incompetents,” he cursed to his aide, absently handing her the comm unit.
“Don’t be concerned, sir,” the woman said soothingly as she retrieved the device and stowed it carefully in the black case that also contained the control codes for the kryolon weapons that were stowed aboard another ship. Curiously, no one knew – except for the president himself – which ship that was. “We knew there would be some losses on our side. This is simply a minor inconvenience.”
The two of them followed a squad of ISS guards, and behind them was a trail of senators and council members – his trusted lieutenants – that made up the bulk of the Confederation’s government, corrupt though it now was.
“It is sloppy work, Elena,” Borge said as they followed the guards around yet another bend in the long march to the gangway, “and there is no excuse for sloppiness. Not in my–”
“Look out!” someone shouted as a hail of crimson bolts came blasting down the corridor, followed by several shadowy blurs that Borge did not realize were Kreelan shrekkas.
Without hesitation, he pushed his aid and latest lover into the line of fire, her body absorbing three energy bolts that would otherwise have found him. Rolling to the floor with the agility of one well accomplished at escaping from tight situations, he snatched the black case from her still-twitching hand and began to crawl through the sudden panic that now filled the corridor, heading for the airlock.
More and more weapons fired as two more squads of ISS guards who had pushed their way through the mewling politicians joined the fray. The deck filled with smoke and the smell of charred flesh and freshly spilled blood, the muzzle flashes surreal in the dim red glare of the emergency lighting.
“Where’s the president?” Borge could hear someone screaming hysterically. “Where’s the pres–” The voice was cut off in the crackle of a blaster firing from somewhere down the corridor that ran perpendicular to the main gangway.
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