“Put your best barrel-bashers on a shuttle with a protective detail and get them over to the Dauntless. I’ve got a project that’ll help restore the old gal’s reputation.
“She’s about to make a donation to the cause.”
The assault commander walked into the situation room, a large glazed space on the starboard side of the Dauntless’ bridge. The sixteen bridge operators were standing against the back wall with a squad of dragoons aiming assault weapons at them.
“Listen up, you useless chair-warmers,” he shouted. “We have no way to tell how many of you were active participants in this rebellion so you’ve all been awarded a blanket conviction for treason.”
He gave them a few seconds to lose the color in their faces. They would all be dead within the next sixty minutes and he allowed the full realization to set in before moving on to the carrot.
“We need this ship ready for action. Your scheme has been neutralized but your little Gray sweeties have revenge on their minds. Inspector Grimm has authorized me to offer amnesty to anyone in this room who’s willing to serve.
“We’re gonna go into Gray territory and teach them a lesson. I’d say your futures will look a lot better if you have green blood on your hands.” He waved a warning finger at them. “If you pull any tricks, your corpse will spend eternity floating out beyond the Rim. Only take this offer if you truly intend to regain your honor.”
Unsurprisingly, none of them chose execution.
Escalation
Agash
Secondary-Javelin Mindar blinked his translucent third eyelid in surprise. He was only thirty hours into his shift as duty officer in Agash orbital control, and there was already an irregularity. He tilted his head backward a couple of degrees.
He realized he was making a spectacle of himself and fought to bring his histrionics under control. Those short-telomere degenerates in operations were always changing plans without filing the appropriate notifications.
Well, Mthlok might be a prime-spear, but he was in one of Mindar’s orbital paths now, so he was going to obey commands or live with a note to his file. He might just get one anyway for letting his ship drift in such a sloppy fashion. It looked as though the fool was preparing to ram his ship into the planet.
Mthlok was about to get a blistering tirade.
He opened a projection in the middle of Mthlok’s bridge. “Prime Spear, I did suggest it was folly to take experimental equipment into the Imperium. Do you require assistance with…” his inflammatory question trailed off. He could feel the pulse hammering in his frontal temporal cortex.
Perhaps now was a good time to indulge in panic.
Urbica smiled politely at Mindar’s image. “So,” she began, “Mthlok was dispatched to Imperial space from this particular rat’s nest? You did warn Mthlok after all...”
The charcoal-colored alien lifted his chin. “You will return our vessel to us immediately or face the consequences of theft,” he droned.
She chuckled. “Calm your self. Such a display is unseemly.”
“You leave me no choice.” The Gray turned away from her and issued a curt command. He turned back to her and waited.
And waited.
A buzz of rotary rail-guns echoed through the ship.
His third eyelid flicked a couple of times.
“I’m assuming, from your obvious confusion, that you tried to activate our self-destruct.” She tilted her head back, ever so slightly, to show her disgust. “Did you really assume we’d leave such a device intact?”
She grinned. “We did leave the transmitter intact because I have a healthy sense of irony, but it’s been connected to a new circuit.” She leaned toward the holographic Gray. “You did manage to destroy something, but it will take time for the ordinance to reach you…”
Paul was in the main hangar, led there by a dragoon provost captain who didn’t know what to make of his discovery. The firing of the external gunnery drew their attention away from the mystery. The two cops walked over to the cluttered mess of jury-rigged transformers and capacitors.
As they approached, a cluster of Naval personnel in red vests closed their helmets. Before Paul could do the same, a vicious buzz was torn from the massive trio of rails sitting between the power equipment and the bridge opening.
His helmet closed just in time to seal in the chlorine stench of the heavy weapon. The carbon dioxide nozzles came on, cooling the rails for the next firing, but they wouldn’t be able to cycle the borrowed weapon very quickly.
Without the closed systems used aboard the Dauntless, the cooling gas would quickly run out. And it took time to generate more.
The white mist was cut off and the weapons techs ran away from the rails. A second buzz announced the main round’s departure.
“Bridge, Gunnery. Rounds complete,” a voice announced over Paul’s open channel.
The first hail of external gunnery was a screen intended to distract defensive fire, not that the Grays bothered much with defensive fire. The first shot from the heavy Naval rail gun had been filled with antimatter sub-munitions, each one capable of destroying the planetary capital below.
The final round had been a full 255mm antimatter warhead. Big enough to turn the rubble into a smoking crater. It would take just under a minute for the first rounds to impact.
Paul walked around the jury rigged mess to get a clear view of the doomed city below. The definition of an honorable military target was far simpler when fighting the Grays. Their cities had no children because the species were all clones.
They’d all lived a full life, several times, and they could use a rest. The Human invaders were more than happy to offer it.
The first rounds began impacting beneath the heavy, swirling cloud cover. Bright flashes lit the growing storm from beneath, and then the first antimatter rounds struck home.
The force of the AM detonations was enough to affect the shape of the weather system, creating new eddies in the pattern.
Then the main round hit, radiating tendrils of cloud vapor out from the point of impact. The storm, several hundred kilometers in diameter, had been killed along with the city beneath.
Colonel Urbica watched as the Gray in front of her was suddenly swept away in a hail of debris and then the image failed. “Bring us around,” she ordered. “Bend space for the rendezvous as soon as she bears.”
“At least six inbound Gray ships,” the sensor officer warned. “Patrol frigates.”
“Good,” she replied. “They’re welcome to come along.”
The Gray carrier was far more nimble than any of its Human counterparts. She shimmered out of sight before the enemy could come into effective firing range.
“Counter is set,” the navigator announced. “Reaching the rendezvous in ten minutes.”
“How’s that rail gun looking?” she asked the gunnery officer.
“All readings are nominal,” he replied. “Carbon dioxide levels should be replenished by the time we drop out. Rails have minor damage from alignment issues but nothing serious.”
“Alright, look alive!” Tony shouted as Urbica’s new ship, the Sucker Punch, blasted her way back into standard space. The Xipe Totec and the Dauntless stood ready to fire on any pursuit vessels and all attack craft had been launched from the LHV. The Sucker Punch cruised past in front of their bows and executed a hard turn to port.
The carrier was just coming onto the firing line when seven blasts of plasma announced the pursuit. Every gun in the small Human flotilla opened up on the Gray frigates, taking them in the flank.
The four lead ships were destroyed before they could get their shields up. The remaining three raised combat shielding and turned to face the threat, but they were hopelessly outgunned.
The closest frigate was taking an incredible pounding from AM rounds and her shield generator must have shaken apart. The blue haze suddenly disappeared and the ship it had been protecting quickly followed suit. At least a hundred rounds had detonated inside the small hull
before the gunnery officers could re-focus fire on a new target.
The farthest frigate suddenly began to shimmer and Urbica ordered all batteries to concentrate on the closer one. “We want one of them to get away,” she explained over the fleetwide channel. “We came here to make a statement and to draw them away from Santa Clara.”
The fleeing Gray ship disappeared into a distortion envelope and her abandoned comrade simply detonated, taking two assault craft with her.
“All call-signs, this is Colonel Urbica. Commence recovery operations and stand by to bend space for Tel Qatshin. Maintain general quarters until we enter distorted space.”
She nodded to Paul as he returned from the hangar.
Paul returned the nod and moved over to study the holographic situation map. An icon appeared in his vision and he opened the message.
“How are your quarters?”
He forced himself not to laugh. He composed his response. “Not bad, a little cramped and the bed is a bit short. The biggest adjustment from the Rope a Dope is the showers.”
“What’s wrong with your shower?”
“There isn’t one. Grays don’t shower more than once a month so there’s a few communal shower rooms for everyone.”
She looked away pretending to study a holographic readout from engineering. Her ears were a little darker than normal. “Not quite everyone. The captain’s quarters has its own shower. Feel free to make use of it.”
Paul took another look around and then, with a polite nod to Colonel Urbica, he walked off the bridge and headed aft. He stopped and frowned. Where the hell would the captain’s quarters be?
He had to assume it would be close to the bridge and almost certainly on the same deck. He began poking around in the central passageway, checking every door but finding nothing but offices or smaller officers’ rooms. Finally he looked forward.
There was a pretty large area, just aft of the bridge with one door. The passageway curved around to the starboard side and led into the busy control room. On the port side, the passageway ended at a single portal.
He approached the door and it slid open. A large space inside had a seating area with three leather couches near the door and a double bed near the window. The Grays weren’t big on furniture but a quick shuttle ride had brought a few comforts over from the Rope a Dope.
He approached the bed, looking down at an open black duffle bag. A stencil on the side declared ‘URBICA, J. M-686-347-231. So he was in the right room.
Then why did it feel so odd? He realized it was partly due to the alien ship. Humans never traveled in anything other than Human ships, believing alien craft to be second rate. The Gray ship, however, was far better suited to combat operations than the old Rope a Dope.
Human ships, like Human software, always followed the same basic patterns and philosophies. The Sucker Punch had protrusions from the floor, ceiling and walls that made no sense to Paul but must have seemed normal to its previous crew. Controls were in counter-intuitive locations and the lighting was a slightly odd shade of red.
He found the door to the captain’s washroom. It was a bare room with carbon matrix walls, a drain hole at one end and, at the other end, the same foot plate he’d seen in the crew washrooms. It had tread-plates for the user’s feet with a self explanatory hole between.
He was about to deactivate his armor when he finally acknowledged the real reason why he felt odd. The frenzied encounter down in the ruins had been a spur-of-the-moment thing. He certainly had no regrets, but there had been almost no conscious thought involved.
Now here he was in the room of a woman who was far above his station, helping himself to her shower. The Urbica family may not be very prominent, but they’d produced eight Grand Senators. She was the daughter of a planetary governor.
Paul was the son of a deceased mine laborer. He represented the high-water mark for the Grimm family, but he still came from the wrong end of the wormhole.
He felt a sudden surge of anger at himself. It was bad enough living in a society that constantly tried to remind him he wasn’t quite good enough. What purpose would he serve by telling himself the same damned thing?
He backed over to the wall between the washroom and the couches and opened the suit. He stepped out, pulled off the under-armor suit and walked into the shower.
Once again, the weirdness of an alien vessel came into play. He felt like an idiot, standing naked in Colonel Urbica’s shower trying to figure out how to turn the damned thing on. He finally noticed that the drain plate was the only thing in the room that stood out, aside from the foot plate at the other end.
He tapped the drain plate with his foot and jets of hot, heavy mist suddenly came at him from every direction. He hadn’t had time for a shower since leaving the owner’s suite on the Pulsar Intrepid.
It felt absolutely magnificent.
He stood in the middle of the room, letting the heat soak into his bones. His entire body was constantly coated with a running layer of hot water and he closed his eyes and let his mind wander.
What he’d found on the hangar deck had been disturbing. The reaction from the provost captain had added a new layer of concern as well. When word got out, the dragoons would demand immediate action and he knew they might end up going very deep into Gray territory.
He opened his eyes as his augmented hearing caught the sound of the cabin door. Footsteps approached the spot where he’d left his armor and he heard the whirring sound of worm gears as another suit opened.
His pulse quickened as he heard the sound of under-armor fabric sliding on skin. He was no longer conflicted about being in this shower.
Footsteps crossed the room followed by the sound of someone rooting through the duffel bag. The sound ceased and nothing happened for a few seconds.
Finally, the steps approached the washroom. He could see a shadow through the thick mist. The form slowly took shape as she approached. Her electrochromatic tattoos had been turned off and she looked much younger. She also seemed a bit nervous.
Paul was relieved that he wasn’t the only one.
She held up a container. “There was soap in my bag,” she chided him with a smile.
“I didn’t want to invade your privacy.”
The smile trembled, but didn’t fade. “Privacy is a relative concept,” she told him. “For someone in my position, there’s often no such thing as privacy.” She stepped closer. “I hadn’t given much thought to the need for privacy until you joined us on the Rope a Dope.”
“And now?”
She poured soap into her hand. “Ever notice, sometimes, that you don’t realize you’re thirsty until you have a drink?” She made a circular gesture. “Turn around and I’ll do your back.”
A New Target
Paul looked up at his mother. “You don’t have enough for the three of us,” he insisted. “If you don’t have to worry about me, you and Emma might have a chance.”
Sarah Grimm wiped the wetness from her face and dropped to her knees to hug her little boy.
Paul felt her hot breath on his neck and water welled up in his own eyes. He knew he’d never feel that comforting sensation again.
“You’re so like your father,” she said, struggling to keep her voice steady. “So ready to sacrifice yourself for the rest of us.”
He pulled away and looked into her face for the last time. “Use the company bounty to get yourselves somewhere decent,” he urged.
Paul woke before he could hear his mother’s reply and he stared up in confusion at the ceiling.
He felt Urbica’s hot breath on his neck. He reached his hand up to wipe his face and she began to stir.
“Mmmm, did I miss anything important while I was asleep?” she murmured.
“Not yet,” he told her, “but the questions are bound to start hitting us soon. I have a few already.”
“Like what?”
“What should we do with Kinsey?” Paul asked her, running his fingers lightly up and down her back. “I
suppose we need him as a witness…”
“Hmmm,” she replied helpfully. “Witness, sure. Sounds like a plan.”
He chuckled, reaching up to trace a finger along her jawline, his finger following the line where implant met skin. “So I’ll take that to mean you don’t care at the moment.”
She reached up to move his hand away from the implants on her jaw. “We do have a few loose ends to tie up, but he can wait for a while.” She frowned. “What I’d really like to do is go eight rounds with him in the arena. I know what he’s been saying about me.”
“That you have a Zhan-Dark complex?”
“We should have an equivalent name for men,” she insisted.
“Well, it would never be used on Kinsey,” Paul asserted. “He has the good taste to show no competence whatsoever, so it’s unlikely anyone would ever feel threatened by him.”
She giggled.
Paul marveled that this could be the same woman whose very presence had subdued a train-full of sailors into silence. “You know, I heard a theory about the name.”
“What name? Zhan-Dark?”
He nodded. “I heard she was a peasant maiden who saved her emperor. She claimed God was talking to her, telling her to lead the army against overwhelming odds.”
She rolled over and sat up. “And I suppose she ended up married to the emperor and had lots of little emperor babies?”
“No.” Paul paused, watching as she walked across to where she’d thrown her duffel-bag a couple of hours ago.
She caught him looking and rewarded him with a slightly embarrassed smile. “Well, what happened to her?” She pulled out a fresh under-armor suit.
“He betrayed her to the same enemy she’d saved him from.”
She stopped, halfway into the suit and stared at him. “Seriously?”
He nodded.
She finished shrugging her way into the suit and its seams began to seal themselves. “Typical male bullshit,” she muttered. “Where did you hear that?”
Rebels and Patriots (Imperium Cicernus Book 3) Page 15