by Rick Partlow
“How long till they intercept?” Minishimi asked, her voice calm.
“At current acceleration, approximately…” he glanced at another readout, “twenty-two minutes.”
“Stay on course, Commander Witten,” Minishimi ordered, eyes on the screen, voice resolute. “Increase acceleration to 2g’s, but keep on the ships. We’re going to have to count on the Bradley to engage the ramships that headed for Earth; we are it out here until the cislunar gunboats get close enough to engage, so we have to do as much damage as possible.” She called up the connection to the Engineering section. “Commander Prieta, we are most likely going to be experiencing one or more drive field intersects. If there’s anything you can do to make sure we survive them as a combat-ready asset, I swear I will buy you a drink in Paris.” Her mouth quirked into a wry smile. “If we live.”
“I’ll do my best, Captain,” Prieta assured her, chuckling appreciatively.
“Increasing acceleration to two g’s,” Witten fed power to the drives and was crushed into his seat as the Decatur leaped ahead toward the next set of enemy ships.
* * *
Drew Franks felt claustrophobic constrained in the acceleration couch behind the Captain, but a memory of Perez’ lifeless body kept him securely strapped in, even at 1g.
“The bogies are in a globe formation,” Lt. Wolford said. “Three thousand kilometer spread between each drive bubble. Closest bogey is…” He double-checked the display. “…three minutes out at current acceleration. My best intercept course is to take the lead ship, then circumnavigate the globe formation from north pole to south.” He shrugged. “Until they react to us, then it all goes out the window.”
“How long before we can try to disrupt the drive field on the closest target?” Lee asked him.
“From the specs that Commander Infante sent to my station,” Wolford guessed, “we will be in range in two minutes, fifteen seconds.” He shook his head. “It’s going to be close: if we want to use Gauss cannons on her, we’ll have to shut off our drive field and that’s going to make it even trickier to intercept the others…”
“Why bother?” Franks wondered out loud. He reddened a bit at Lee and Wolford’s questioning and annoyed glances, but he pushed the embarrassment aside and expounded. “Look, we have to stop them either way, so don’t shut down our drive field at all. Use the modified sensor beams to shut down theirs, then just ram them. If their field shuts down, they’re toast and we keep right on going.” He shrugged fatalistically. “If it doesn’t work, we can at least take out one of them before we’re incapacitated.”
“Sound strategy,” Wolford said with a nod, a bit of surprise and perhaps respect in his voice. “It might work.”
“You’re awfully cavalier about risking all our lives, Lt. Franks,” Lee commented quietly, regarding him with an expression that he thought might have been hiding a profound fear.
“Ma’am,” he reminded her, “my butt’s sitting right behind yours.” He laughed wryly. “I’m twenty-five years old; trust me, I don’t want to die. But this is our job, right? If we don’t do it, who will?”
Lee didn’t respond immediately, staring for a moment at the viewscreen and the approaching enemy ships. “Do it, Lt. Wolford. It’s the best chance we have.”
“Aye, ma’am,” Wolford said. “Requesting helm control to my station.”
“Helm is yours, Tactical,” Bevins told him, releasing the controls.
“Coming into range,” Wolford murmured, eyes glued to the display, where a pale red globe around the ship’s icon indicated the range of the modified sensor emitters. That red expanse was just ready to overlap the drive bubble of the first bogey, a wickedly Spartan silver wedge in the projection. “Firing gravimetic pulses now.”
Had someone been watching what happened with the naked eye, they would have seen precious little. Perhaps they might have noticed the distortion of the starfield as the Eysselink drives stretched and folded and spindled the fabric of space-time, but little else. The ship’s computer, however, gave a much more satisfying recreation of events: the blocky monolith of the Bradley plodded forward, surrounded by a shimmering globe of unreality that represented the drive field, approaching another, identical globe with the silver wedge of the ramship at its center. Then a wavering line of uncertainty connected the Bradley to the ramship’s drive field for a fleeting moment and suddenly the ramship was naked to the universe, its drive field dissipating in a wash of quantum foam.
“Her drive field’s down and…” Wolford’s booming announcement cut short as their own Eysselink field rammed directly into the unprotected ramship and it abruptly ceased to be, torn to subatomic particles in a sun-bright release of energy.
“Yes!” Franks yelled exultantly, pumping a fist, his cheers echoed by the rest of the bridge crew.
“At ease on the bridge!” Lee ordered, but Franks could see the grin brightening her face. “Take us to the next target, Lt. Wolford! Increase acceleration to two g’s!”
“Aye, ma’am, increasing acceleration.”
Franks felt the hand of Newton pressing him back into his couch with twice his normal 75 kilograms and saw the Bradley rushing forward on a hemispherical curve toward the next ship in the globe formation. Through a pounding pulsebeat in his head he heard Wolford: “Firing emitters at second target.”
And just as quickly as before, the next wedge-shaped enemy vessel was nonexistent. For a moment, Franks dared to hope that they might be able to take out the whole flight of ramships, but then… “They’re breaking!” Wolford warned, and on the display Franks could see that the four remaining Eysselink drive ships were breaking out of the globe formation, two of them increasing to 3g’s acceleration and maneuvering straight down from their previous plane of inclination while the other two…
”Two of them are trying to pincer us!” The two ships were on opposite sides of the Bradley’s line of advance, trying to trap the Republic cruiser between them.
“Shift course to follow the other two and increase to 3g’s!” Lee barked.
Franks tightened his stomach muscles and tried to prepare himself, but the crushing weight still squeezed the air from his lungs and his vision was reduced to a narrow tunnel. For a moment, he was certain he was going to pass out, but then he forced himself to drag in a shallow breath and clenched the muscles in his gut and his vision widened out again enough for him to see the Bradley pursuing the two ships that had cut downward.
“Dammit,” Wolford grunted out, barely audible. “The two that were trying to trap us broke off now…they’re heading insystem again, at 4g’s.” There was a shallow rasp as the man struggled to get a breath. “Ma’am, we’re not going to be able to catch them all in time…”
Lee didn’t speak for a moment, and Franks thought perhaps she couldn’t, that the acceleration had rendered her unconscious. But then she said, with amazing clarity despite the g-forces: “Pursue the two ahead of us, Lt. Wolford. It’s the best we can do.”
Shit, Franks wanted to scream it but he couldn’t even whisper it. Shit, shit, shit!
How many people were going to die because he couldn’t do enough?
Chapter Thirty-Seven
“You should be in bed, Tom,” Shannon chided the man quietly as he leaned his head back against his seat, closing his eyes tiredly.
“And I suppose you’ve just been lying around relaxing this last week, ma’am?” Tom muttered in response, not opening his eyes.
Shannon squinted against the morning sun as the flitter headed east into the Texas dawn, endless brown plains unfolding beneath them. “To be honest, Tom, I can’t remember the last time I slept more than an hour. But then, I didn’t get shot to shit just three days ago, and you did.”
“The docs say it’s healed up enough for me to be on my feet,” Tom said, shrugging slightly and wincing as it tugged at the healing wound in his neck. There was still an ugly red weal there, but that too would fade as the medical nanotech continued to do its work over the next
few days.
Shannon shook her head, too exhausted to argue the point further.
“I still don’t know how that bastard snuck away,” Ari Shamir growled from the pilot’s seat. “I mean, you dropped him off in the middle of fucking nowhere Nevada, right? How the hell did he slip satellite coverage?”
Roza reached over from the copilot’s seat and patted his arm. Ari had been growling quite a bit the last couple days; he was still angry at himself for believing that Shannon had been brainwashed and for setting Kage up to stop her.
“He had planned ahead for this,” Shannon explained with a pained look on her face. “Just like he seems to plan ahead for everything. He even had an all-terrain groundcar waiting to take him to the Vegas Transportation Hub. Hell, Ari, you were just there, you saw the same security video I did.”
“Saw the same blue screen, you mean,” Ari grumbled. “That fucking bastard has better jammers than we do.” Ari turned away as a call came in over his ‘link and he spoke softly into the mic.
“So,” Roza said to Shannon, “you think this Helenne D’Annique woman will know where he is going?”
Shannon shrugged, then rubbed at her eyes: they wouldn’t stop burning with fatigue, despite the stimulants that were keeping her alert. “I think she’s the only fucking link we have left to this whole thing. And I sure as hell don’t trust the Houston cops to bring her in, not with everything that’s riding on this.”
“We’re five minutes out,” Ari said as he turned back to Shannon and the others. “That was Sergeant Manning. She and Griffin have had eyes on the target for the last twelve hours. She says that D’Annique is in her apartment and should be there until she leaves for work.”
“Do we take her in her apartment or when she leaves, Colonel?” Roza wondered.
“Inside,” Shannon decided after a moment. “It’s a risk---she may have alarms and monitors; but on the street there are too many variables, and we don’t have enough people or vehicles to ensure a safe capture. Ari,” she said to the pilot, “tell Manning to break into the local security systems and run a complete isolation program on her apartment. No signals get out to the police or emergency services, all communications get jammed, starting the minute our feet hit the ground.”
“Got it, ma’am,” Ari acknowledged, then called Sgt. Manning to deliver the instructions.
“Stunners or other nonlethal weapons only,” Shannon reminded the others. “For one thing, she may have been an innocent brainwashed into doing this. And for another, without her, we have jack until Antonov decides to make his next move.”
“We’re sure there’s no other way out?” Shannon murmured quietly to Sgt. Manning as they stood at the opposite end of the hall from Hellene D’Annique’s apartment door. The building was upscale, as befitted someone with the former First Officer’s current salary, with plush carpeting in the hallways, tasteful art pieces on the walls and an impressive security system that had taken them nearly a half hour to shut down remotely.
“Ma’am,” Manning replied with a newbie’s deference in her voice, “I’ve checked the plans for the building, ran exterior scans on thermal and sonic, and did a quick visual scan using the building security cams. There’s only one door visible, no exterior windows and no roof access, but I haven’t done a physical inspection so I can’t be sure there isn’t any other entrance.”
“That’ll have to be good enough,” Shannon declared. “We don’t have time to wait.” There was no one else in the hallway at the moment, thankfully, but that wouldn’t last.
“She’s still in the bedroom, ma’am,” Manning told her, angling the tablet so that Shannon could see the security feed. D’Annique was just out of the shower and in the midst of pulling a grey business suit over her solid, muscular frame.
She nodded to Ari, Roza and Tom, who waited on either side of the apartment door. They were all dressed in civilian clothes, but wore body armor under their jackets and had stunners in hand. Shannon took the tablet from Sgt. Manning, found the control for the security override and ordered the system to unlock D’Annique’s front door.
The minute the door slid open, Ari was through it, stunner at the ready, and Roza went in directly behind him. Shannon moved up and entered right behind Tom, pulling a pistol from the shoulder holster under her light jacket. She needed D’Annique alive, but one of them needed the ability to use deadly force if the situation called for it.
D’Annique’s apartment was uncluttered and impeccably kept, as neat as one might expect from a former first officer on a cruiser, but strangely impersonal. As she followed the others through the entrance hall and into the living room, she didn’t see a single photo or video display---not one family portrait, not one shot of D’Annique herself, not even a video of an old pet. There was a generic art holo inlaid in the living room wall, but it looked as if it had come with the apartment. Even the furniture had a generic look to it, as if there were no trace of D’Annique’s personality at all, no stamp of her on anything in the apartment.
Shannon and Tom took up an overwatch position by the edge of the entrance hall and the living room while Ari and Roza silently swept the kitchen and dining room, signaling the area clear. Their collective attention turned to the short hallway to the bedroom and Shannon risked a glance at the tablet once more: D’Annique was pulling on her jacket, her square, homely face calm and unconcerned as she moved to the door, pausing to pick up a small briefcase from next to her bed.
Shannon got Ari’s attention and signed that their target was coming out. Ari and Roza edged along the same side of the hall, Ari high and Roza crouched low, while Tom and Shannon moved to cover them from the edge of the living room. Shannon could hear the soft footsteps of D’Annique’s pumps on the carpet of the hallway and she brought up her pistol, ready to support Ari and Roza…
…when the small briefcase sailed lazily around the corner, landing with a gentle thump in front of the sofa.
“Down!” Shannon yelled, instinctively grabbing Tom by the arm and dragging them both behind the wall to the entrance hall.
Years of training kicked in and she opened her mouth and closed her eyes, feeling the concussion deep in her chest and seeing the sun-bright light through eyelids squeezed shut.
Flash-bang, part of her mind thought clinically, pushing aside the adrenaline, the panic and the fear for her friends. No other way out, so her next move will be…
Shannon had dropped the tablet when she grabbed Tom, but she had held onto her weapon: she twisted around to bring it up but D’Annique was already firing, the compact, small-caliber machine pistol spraying a hail of tantalum slugs across the room as she rushed for the entrance hall. Shannon ducked back, hugging the floor as the high-speed bullets tore through the wall above her, bracing herself to brave the metal storm to try to stop D’Annique before she could escape…
…and then the high-pitched chatter of the machine pistol was abruptly interrupted by the full-throated boom of a 10mm service auto and Hellene D’Annique pitched forward, her weapon clattering to the floor as she fell heavily, clutching at her right arm. Shannon’s head whipped around and she saw Sgt. Manning standing behind her in the entrance hall, eyes narrowed and face intense, her sidearm still extended as she watched the downed woman carefully.
“Tom,” she said to Crossman as they both clambered up from the floor, “get D’Annique secured.”
While Tom went to the wounded woman, Shannon stepped over to check on Ari and Roza, who’d taken the full brunt of the concussion grenade concealed in the briefcase. They were both still prone on the tile floor; Roza with her eyes squeezed shut, a trickle of blood running from her nose, while Ari was opening his eyes wide and rubbing them, mouth gaping as he tried to clear his ears.
“It’s okay!” Shannon yelled to them, trying to get through the hollow ringing in their ears---she’d experienced a concussion grenade before, in training, and knew what they were going through. “We have her; it’s okay!” She didn’t want either of them o
pening up blindly with their stunners while they were in a daze.
Slowly, their eyes began to focus on her and Roza nodded silently.
“We’re okay, ma’am,” Ari said as Shannon helped them to their feet, his voice loud and unmodulated because he couldn’t hear himself talking.
“Get them out to the flitter,” Shannon instructed Manning. The NCO nodded, holstering her sidearm and guiding Ari and Roza out into the hallway.
Tom, she saw, had D’Annique up, her hands flex-cuffed behind her back, a smart bandage covering the wound in her upper arm and her eyes glazed over from the sedative he’d given her.
“Get her out of here,” Shannon told him. “We have to clear the area before local law enforcement arrives.” The security hack would slow them down, but sooner or later someone would call and report the gunshots.
Shannon brought up the rear as Tom hustled the insensate D’Annique through the hallway and into the apartment building’s lobby, tastefully and expensively decorated as was fitting for a high-end complex in the upper-class end of Houston, and occupied by two visibly horrified young middle management types in fashionable business wear, staring at the handcuffed, blood-soaked D’Annique being shoved forward by Tom Crossman with a stunner aimed at her chest.
“Are you…” stuttered one of them, a red-headed woman with a restruct face and eyes too green to be natural. “Are you…police?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Shannon told her, making her voice serious but cordial. “Sorry for the commotion. We’ve shut down a weapons smuggling ring that was operating out of this building. You can scan it on the net in about an hour, I imagine.”
“Wow,” the man breathed, smiling. “In our building?”
Leaving the couple to debate whether they might be interviewed, Shannon and Tom quickly moved D’Annique out the front door to the covered walk leading down the length of the apartment block, past a few more gawking civilians to the open lot where they’d landed the flitter. The vehicle waited with the boarding ramp down, its silver-grey exterior shining painfully bright in the morning sun but Sgt. Manning visible through the cockpit canopy in the pilot’s seat.