She saluted the blind screen snappily. “Lieutenant JG Loralynn Kennakris, Nereidian League CEF Non-Imperial Forces reporting, sir. Admiral Heydrich can’t talk right now, but if you leave your name and number, I’ll give him the message.” She laughed, a little hysterically, and saw the hair of his short military cut stand up. “Oh, by the way: if you want to keep him alive for another few minutes, be a good boy and try not to bother me. Bye!”
She switched off. When she turned back, Heydrich was on one knee again, struggling to rise.
“Oh, don’t bother.” She gestured with the flechette gun. “Strength’s at a premium, you know.” In his state, she wasn’t sure he caught the reference.
“It won’t work,” he husked at her. “Can’t use—me. Strict . . . orders—require—”
“Oh, it’s always worth a shot,” she cut him off. “Besides, I have something to tell you.”
He blinked, groggily. He was going down fast. “Wha—what?”
“I lied,” she said happily. “About everything. Miranda’s not a fake, Seventh’s still there and we don’t know shit about your Regulus plans or your deal with Maxor. Of course, I’ll tell everyone as soon as I’m done with you.”
He shook his head, a shuddering twitch. “What? Why . . . why—”
“Like I told that nice Commander Tweedle-Dum: I’m officially crazy. They yanked my flight rating. Pissed me off.” The sentence ended with bared teeth. “Well, time’s up.”
His eyes widened, the trembling mouth went slack. “No! You said— Don’t! I can—”
“Lied about that too.” She shot him in the chest. He stared stupidly at the bright red flower spreading over the front of his bright white uniform jacket until his eyes filmed and he collapsed forward on his face.
Chapter Nine
IHS Ilya Turabian
orbiting Asylum Station
Kris sagged against the console as the adrenal fire in her veins began to fade, leaving quivering in its wake. The pain in her side had started to flare up. Better bandage the damn thing. She stuffed the pistol back in its holster, went and searched Heydrich’s corpse and the two by the Tacticon. The ghoulish activity rewarded her with a collection of handkerchiefs and a uniform undershirt. She packed the wounds with two of the handkerchiefs, cut bandages out of the undershirt with a jeweled pocket knife she’d found on Heydrich and managed to bind her wounds somewhat clumsily. It helped a little.
While she was in the middle of her bandaging, banging and grinding noises began to make themselves heard, muffled somewhat by the triplet of blast doors. She grinned at the noises.
Hope you like working in a confined space, guys.
Then the young, harried-looking officer appeared again on the screen, hailing urgently. She punched the voice button, snapped, “Yes, I hear you knocking. Knock it the hell off if you want your people alive,” and flipped the comm off. She hoped that would confuse them some and maybe interrupt the work on the doors, but if it failed to, she wasn’t worried. Time was not yet a pressing concern; the citadel button should buy her more than enough—if it met League specs. Of course, it might not . . .
Savagely, Kris grabbed her wandering thoughts, made them address the problem at hand. She needed to get a message to PrenTalien to tell him what was up. No, she reconsidered. First, she should go through the message traffic and find out exactly who had been ordered to do what . . . No, that would take too long.
Dammit, I’m not thinking straight . . .
She chewed her nails. Okay, what she really should do was send a message, then dump everything on PrenTalien and let him figure it out. That was fine, but she continued to worry at her fingertips.
If he was still near the rendezvous point, PrenTalien was only about six hours away—five in a fast battlecruiser. Could she ask for a pick-up? Dumb question, she chided herself, of course I can ask. Effecting one was another matter. Even though the CIC armor might keep Ilya’s crew out for a long time, PrenTalien would still have to take over the ship, compartment by compartment . . .
Well, maybe not. All their weapons are in here—they can’t even bring up shields.
Until they ran an alternate control net. It wouldn’t take them long to rerun some cabling. Unless she could convince them not to.
Yes, the thought blossomed wonderfully, all their weapons controls are in here. Maybe she could convince them to leave things alone until PrenTalien arrived. It was very unlikely she could remain on her feet that long; she was burning the stim-tab awfully fast with a broken heel and the holes in her side—but the Halith didn’t know that. If a good threat kept them at bay, and if the blast doors held . . .
She needed to know what was going on. Going to the Tacticon, she brought up the local situation map and displayed it on one of the intact wall screens. That would allow her to watch it from anywhere in the room. Then she put the scanner on auto-sweep and set the Tacticon to update continuously.
Now let’s see what we can see.
Ilya was still in her parking orbit, five hundred kilometers above Asylum Station. The rump of the Ilya’s escort—two destroyers and seven corvettes—were still around and still in their parking orbits. She smiled. Of course, they were—all their comms routed through here. Expanding the Tacticon display out to Asylum’s boundaries, she discovered the red icon of an enemy fleet in-bound. The Asylum fleet returning. Heydrich must have recalled them.
Now why’d you go and do that, you asshole?
She highlighted the red icon and checked the information window. Without deep radar, the scanners couldn’t tell her much, just a bearing vector and energy profiles. From the latter, she knew they were heavy combatants, and going like hell. Their number was indeterminate, something between several and a lot. They were radiating no comms, and the lack of spread on the bearing line implied attack formation. The Tacticon munched on its imperfect data and produced an opinion that they’d arrive in about an hour. Kris rapped her knuckles sharply on the console.
Well, that fucks things up royally.
She could ask PrenTalien to run a pick-up operation against a lightly defended ship that couldn’t shoot back; she couldn’t ask him to mount a full-scale invasion to the same end. Something in her wanted to curse and scream, but as she gulped breath, it fizzled, leaving her feeling tired and strangely empty.
Looks like last post, kiddo.
Sixty minutes. Certainty settled in her like a sigh. Damn if she was gonna go quietly then. She went to the main fire control console, brought up the on-line documentation and began reading it. She’d gotten through the overview section when the screen lit up and chimed again.
That took ‘em awhile.
This time it was the senior captain she had seen with Tweedle-Dum during the first interrogation session. He had a rumpled 0300-look about him that made Kris smile.
Yeah, I’ve had one hell of a day, too. But it’s looking up now . . .
She pressed the voice switch. “Greetings, Captain. Hell of a nice ship you have here. Highly automated too. I like the weapons controls—very user-friendly, although I’m not a friendly user. Would you like to keep it?”
The captain merely looked annoyed at her little joke.
I knew ya had no sense of humor.
“Your threats serve no purpose, Lieutenant. You can do nothing to me, even as I—at the moment—can do nothing to you. You may dispose of your hostages as you choose, but we will have the hatch open in a couple of hours and then you will answer for their condition. If you choose to surrender now, I may be convinced to be lenient.”
“Right,” Kris remarked, “your boss said that too. I didn’t believe him either.” She flipped off the documentation screen and brought up the weapons control screen. “But I think you’re wrong about my threats, Captain. I believe I see, on this here wonderful weapons control console of yours, about a half-dozen ways to incinerate this ship—”
“And yourself—”
“Goes without saying.” Her smile was tight and grim, but wasted
on the blind screen. “But I’m sure Imperial Halith will miss Ilya Turabian a lot more than the CEF misses me.”
The captain waved his hand, dismissing her. “This conversation is pointless. Fire control will not operate in a friendly IFF environment. You cannot lock onto anything. Nothing you manage to launch will explode—the fuses will dud in the proximity of friendly craft. In a few minutes, my engineers will have rigged alternate communication and control circuits, and we can countermand anything you do. I advise—”
“Tell ‘em to shag it, Captain. I’ve got one hell of a demo comin’ up here real quick.” She killed the comms and returned her attention to selecting weapons. The captain was half-right: she couldn’t use fire control to lock onto any friendly craft and the fuses would indeed dud. But he was also half-wrong: she could still fire an unlocked spread on a dead bearing and set the self-destruct timers to coincide with the point of closest approach. Against a maneuvering target, it was a useless tactic—but Asylum Station, five hundred klicks below, was not a maneuvering target.
Stations like Asylum, at four klicks across, were huge but fragile—they simply could not be otherwise—and they were also under a tremendous amount of precisely balanced and distributed mechanical stress. Given that combination, just nine or ten precisely targeted torp hits could cause a station of Asylum’s size to break apart—about the same number as needed to take down a battleship. Structurally, what mattered was the station’s core, which was about nine hundred meters in diameter. Compromising it would result in tidal forces ripping the station apart within a few hours. Two or three clean hits in the right place on one of the fusion towers might rupture it, destroying the station in a matter of minutes.
That was why her attack with eight torpedoes might have been crazy, but not completely lunatic. If she had been able to get off her second strike, and allowing for a seventy-five percent hit ratio (a decent assumption), that would have given her six hits: not enough to destroy the station but certainly enough to lay on some serious hurt. If all eight had scored, she’d have stood a slim but non-zero chance of taking the station down. As things were now, with the damage already sustained and considering the torps would be unguided, she figured a dozen or so hits would be needed to destroy it, maybe a couple more.
She brought up the selection menu; the status lights told her they had not succeeded in cutting power to any of the weapons. That was, of course, the point of armored junction boxes and cables. The citadel button would have tripped all the interlocks in the weapons spaces, and the override was in here. The captain was going to have quite a chore ahead of him, messily dismantling his own ship. His comment about a “few minutes” was mostly bravado—unless closer to fifteen, or even twenty, counted as ‘a few’ in his estimation. But whatever the number, it was much longer than she needed.
On the fire control display, she was happy to see that Ilya was torp-rich, with a full loadout. She selected an even three dozen torpedoes and warmed them up. When asked, the Tacticon gave her the fly-out times, launch azimuths, and pitch-over angles she needed. She keyed them into the torpedoes manually and set the destruct timers to bracket the calculated flight time to account for any uncertainties. Twelve to fourteen hits out of thirty-six seemed like good odds.
The torpedoes absorbed her instructions and indicated their readiness with an array of small green lights. She flipped open the latched cover and turned the arming key to the ON position. The array of green lights turned red. Then she switched another of the big wall screens to view mode and adjusted it to show Asylum Station at maximum magnification.
The station was in a standard synchronous orbit over the sterile, airless ball of Asylum’s largest planet. Its five latticed tiers, surrounded by the delicate-looking girdle of the outer works, were pierced by three tall, tapering spires—fusion towers—anchored to the large, inverted, shallow-saucer shape housing the hanger facilities and docking bays. Just now coming out of eclipse, with the rusty light of Asylum’s dim M-Class primary spilling across half of it, it reminded her of a stack of snowflakes supported on icicle spires. The fragile-looking arrays of struts and tubes and faceted compartments caught the rays like dew on a spider’s web, scattering it in rainbow glints and ruby highlights. The three tall fusion towers were backlit, picked out by an ivory glow, smooth and featureless except for a blistered crescent that showed where one of her torps had hit. The hanger deck and main docking bay also showed signs of her assault; scalloped blast marks pocking the entrances low on the port side, and they were running stringers along a good chunk of the outer works.
Four of four, she mused. I did good.
She reached out and activated the comm. “Bridge? CIC. That demo’s ready, Captain. I suggest you take a look at Asylum Station—it’s going away in a minute. I’ll bring the shields up so we can all watch without being burned too bad.” She switched the shields on. The familiar green glow tinted her viewer. “I hope your people down there are up on their evac drills.”
The captain’s face loomed on the screen. “I don’t know what sort of silly game you are attempting to play, Lieutenant. Even if you launch a missile spread and manage to hit the station, you’ll find the contact fuses are dudded—”
“Goddamn, you’re slow,” Kris broke in. “What’s it take to make captain in this navy anyway? Here, watch.” She pressed the launch button. There was a slight subacoustic shudder as the torpedoes ripple-fired. On the Tacticon, they were little green lines arcing away; on the viewer, there was just the blue-white flash of their boost motors receding. The flight time was slightly over thirty seconds. She turned back to the screen.
“You see, Captain, you forgot about the destruct timers. They can be set to a hundredth of a second, and this nice Tacticon you got here gives fly-out times better than that. Combined, that’s a spread of about a couple hundred meters, and that station’s core is what? Almost a klick across?”
On the screen, the captain’s face flushed bright red, then drained to ghastly white. His lips worked soundlessly, unable to come up with any appropriate vocalization. Kris glanced at the fly-out timer.
“Oops! You’re gonna miss it!”
On her view screen, Asylum Station was suddenly riddled by a burst of lightning-white flashes, surrounded by shimmering halos of expanding debris. Holes appeared in the snowflake lattices and the central core structure, their edges decorated with a coruscating blue-green nimbus. Then the entire structure began to quake. At first, just a series of sharp tremors, then a slow, fatal oscillation that seemed to shake off a cloud of metallic spores. Some were big enough to be resolved as shapes; others were visible only by the flashes of their separation motors. Evacuation pods. From their number and spacing, Kris thought they were handling it pretty well.
She watched as the rippling layers began to wave apart from one another, the blue-green nimbus spreading to engulf the ruptured edges, and then the top of the central fusion tower began to erupt a jet of blindingly blue-white plasma. Emergency venting—the reactor containment had ruptured. Three minutes later, the other two fusion towers plumed, and the station was enveloped by a pulsating ion glow shot through with brilliant flashes of static discharge: sulfurous yellow, electric blue-violet, and occasionally, a streak of searing red. The plumes began to broaden and merge as the tops of the fusion towers boiled off and, for an instant, the station was surrounded by a corona like an eclipsed sun. Then it exploded in a dazzling smear of light that burned the eyes, even on the view screens.
The image rippled as the shock wave rocked the Ilya Turabian. A glowing cloud of plasma spread across the screen; a convulsing, bright orange flower, cooling eventually to red, then to infrared and invisibility.
Kris drew a long shaky breath, suddenly tired, and not at all as exultant as she’d expected to be. The explosion had burned something out of her, and all she felt was hollow.
Hey Huron. I thought you might be lonely, so I decided to send you some friends. We’re all friends afterwards, aren’t we? I think I re
ad that somewhere—if not, sorry. Ignore Heydrich anyway—he’s probably still a shit. By the way, if ya wanna wait, I’ll be along in a few.
The black spaces between the stars ate the thought and sent no echo back.
“Well, Captain,” she said aloud, turning her eyes from the now empty vista—empty but for an expanding debris cloud, winking like ice chips in the thin reddish light. “You a believer yet?”
The captain’s face was turned away from the screen; evidently he’d been watching after all. His profile was striated along anguished lines, and the pallid skin glistened with sweat. She watched as color crept back into his cheeks in uneven blotches, like badly applied make-up on a corpse. At last, he turned to face the screen, his eyes livid in the sickly face.
“Lieutenant”—he made it into the deadliest word he knew—“those blast doors will open. And when they do—”
“Oh, I know what comes next,” Kris snapped tiredly. “Don’t even fuck’n bother.” His lips curled around a retort, but he never got it out. Someone off screen interrupted him; Kris thought she heard the word “company”. The captain swung his head the other way in the jerky, harassed manner of a man assailed from all sides at once. The screen blanked.
Must’ve noticed his friends, Kris reckoned. He sure didn’t seem very happy. Of course, he had to explain why he just blew up a major installation. Bet his superiors don’t have any sense of humor either. Well, she’d better see what was going on, too. No telling how the other ships would react to Ilya suddenly fragging her own base.
The tactical display, when she glanced at it, showed mostly chaos. Two of the corvettes were tumbling helplessly out of control—they must have been hit by the shock wave before they could get their shields up. One of the destroyers had been in too close and was wallowing drunkenly now, the scanners showing heavy blast damage to its port side.
Kris clucked her tongue. Bad reflexes, guys.
Loralynn Kennakris 3: Asylum Page 47