by Jake Elwood
A chunk of shrapnel went right through. That means there’s a hole in my foot. She looked down, then swallowed hard as her stomach tried to empty itself. Her foot was a gory mess.
“Hold still. I’m going to seal the wound. Then we’ll get you to the surgery.”
Alice looked away as the woman went to work. She saw a couple of men carry Cheng out on a stretcher. He looked awful, his skin blanched, his leg crusted in trauma gel. But he gave her a grin as he went past at eye level.
Warm tingles spread through her injured foot. She felt her first twinge of pain, but it faded quickly. She looked down and saw her toes sticking out from a nest of pink gel. “That’ll hold you for now,” the woman said. “You’ll have to wait for a stretcher, though.”
“Sharla? Can you give me a hand?”
The woman glanced over her shoulder, then looked at Alice.
“Go,” said Alice. “I’m fine.”
“Don’t get up,” Sharla said. “The painkillers in the gel might make you feel pretty good, but you need to stay on your ass.” She stood and hurried away.
“What a shit show,” Alice said to no one in particular.
“I guess.”
She looked around. McDougall stood beside her. He dropped to one knee, looked at her foot, and grimaced. Then he looked her in the eye. “I suppose we should have just gassed them. But I'm glad we tried to do the right thing.”
Alice shrugged, suddenly weary. She'd saved a couple of people who would now be prisoners. Either they'd die when the ship reached Novograd, or they'd eventually get free to rejoin the war effort. She'd gotten Cheng hurt, and herself. It was pure luck none of the other spacers were hurt or killed. “I don't know if I'm a damn fool or not.”
“Maybe we're done,” said McDougall. “Maybe this was the last pocket of resistance on the ship.”
“We're not done,” said Alice. “Not by a long damn shot.” She looked at the corpse of the woman she'd killed. Novograd was infested with soldiers just like her. Liberating the planet was going to be a bloody nightmare.
Chapter 5
Tom and O'Reilly stood in a room designated, in the usual imaginative style of the Dawn Alliance, as Five–One. That meant it was on Deck Five, right at the front of the ship. The room also encompassed Deck Four, because it had a very high ceiling. Leather benches lined the walls. A long table lined with comfortable-looking padded chairs dominated the room, with several smaller tables scattered around.
“I think this is the Officers’ Mess,” O'Reilly said. “It's … almost nice.”
Tom nodded his agreement. This was luxury for military men as imagined by a totalitarian government. There were some nice touches, like living vines and flowers covering the starboard bulkhead, but it still felt like a soulless steel box.
The table was polished to a high shine, and he leaned over it, squinting at his reflection. Without a proper mirror he couldn’t make out the red burn across his forehead. He closed first one eye, then the other. His right eye was fine. His left eye was a little blurry, but he thought it was getting better.
“Hang on, what's this?” O'Reilly walked over to a console near the entrance doors. He tapped the screen awake, then did some poking and swiping. The lights dimmed, then brightened. Music blared from hidden speakers, an ugly synthesized beat. O'Reilly quickly silenced it.
Then a rumble came from the forward bulkhead. Tom looked in that direction. The wall was blank and dark. He'd taken it for painted steel panels, though he hadn't looked closely. Now he noticed a gleam of reflected light. Is that glass?
Three horizontal bars appeared, stretching the full width of the forward wall. Stripes of green light appeared, then grew. Tom grunted in surprise. “It's a window.”
“It's a window,” O'Reilly agreed. He left the panel and rejoined Tom. They stood side by side, watching as thick plates of armor on the far side of the glass rose and turned sideways until they were perfectly horizontal. The front wall of the room was a single transparent panel from floor to ceiling. Three sheets of armor plating, edge-on from his point of view, made black lines across the window. Aside from that, there was an unimpeded view of hyperspace.
A vast storm raged in front of the ship. A thousand shades of green churned and swirled, darkening and brightening as energy shifted and flowed within the maelstrom.
O'Reilly said, “Looks like we’ll skirt it pretty close.”
With proper repairs the battleship could ignore any storm in the seventh dimension. She was badly damaged, though, and she was accompanied by a couple of raiders. The Rime Frost and the Trickling Brook still shadowed the battleship. The rest of the fleet had returned to join the defense of New Panama.
“We're making good time,” said O'Reilly. “We've got decent navigation, too. This tub lost a lot of nav thrusters during the battle, but the extra boosters help with steering.”
Tom nodded absently. Booster rockets were an innovation of the New Panama fleet. Designed originally for salvage work, they could be quickly mounted to the side of a disabled ship to move it. The fleet used them to bring back captured ships with locked computers or crippled engines.
The boosters were never designed for anything the size of a battleship. But with four boosters attached to the hull and a bit of output from two of the battleship's own engines, they were moving at a reasonable clip.
“I estimate eight days to Novograd,” O'Reilly said. “Nine if we hit a lot of weather.”
“That will do,” Tom said. It was enough time for the ship to be reported missing, but not so long that she would be assumed lost or captured.
He hoped.
Well, the ship is a juggernaut. Even if they realize we’re a Trojan horse the moment they see us, they'll have a hell of a time stopping us.
“Do we have a plan?” O’Reilly asked. “For Novograd, I mean. Assuming we survive the assault on the station.”
“Not a really detailed plan,” Tom admitted. They’d be winging it to a large degree once they arrived. Any attempt to scout the system risked alerting the enemy and spoiling the element of surprise. His plan was to drop into normal space as close to Novograd as he could manage, and then see what happened.
“Pity we can’t nuke the station,” O’Reilly said. “Bastards deserve it.”
Tom shuddered, remembering the Kestrel with most of her crew dying slowly of radiation poisoning. “We’ve got the Dawn Alliance honoring the new treaties,” he said. “Let’s leave the genie in the bottle.”
O’Reilly nodded. He’d been on the Kestrel with Tom. He knew the horrors of nuclear combat.
“We could die attacking the station,” Tom said. “If that happens, well, we have all the plans we need. If we survive, we’ll stay in orbit and wait for reinforcements.” The Free Neorome Navy wouldn’t be able to do much to support the battleship, but the United Worlds had considerable naval forces in the Green Zone. They were unwilling to launch an attack on Novograd, but if the station was gone, surely they’d send a few ships to help keep the system.
“What about the planet?”
Tom shrugged. “We can only do so much. Smashing the station is our job. Someone else will have to liberate the planet.”
“There’s local resistance,” said O’Reilly. “We should try to find out how to contact them.”
“I’ll talk to Alice.”
O’Reilly smirked. “Of course you will.”
“Oh, put a cork in it.” Tom turned in a circle, examining the room. “If this is the Officers’ Mess, where’s the booze?”
“Looted in the first ten minutes after we boarded, of course.”
“Of course,” Tom said. “Close the shutters, and let's continue our tour.” He sighed and turned away from the windows with their glorious view of the storm.
“You look tired, Sir. We could do this later.”
Tom chuckled. He was exhausted, but it wasn't as if he could rest. “We may as well do it now. The truth is, I'm too wound up to sit still.”
They resumed
their expedition, climbing up and down ladders and staircases, moving from port to starboard and back again. Tom had forgotten just how big battleships were. This inspection tour was going to take a very long time.
Thirty minutes later they were back on Deck Five, not far aft of the Officers’ Mess, when the sound of a blast pistol came echoing down the corridor. They looked at one another, then drew their own sidearms and headed aft at a run.
The corridor ahead was clear, but raised voices came from a stairwell. Tom led the way, despite a heroic effort by O'Reilly to get in front of him. He dropped into a crouch and crept downward, one step at a time.
A woman in a green New Panama uniform stepped into view, leveling a rifle at them. She tilted the barrel up and said, “Jesus. You scared me.” She took another look. “Captain,” she added, and straightened. “Captains.”
Tom straightened up and trotted down the stairs. “What's going on?”
An interesting expression flitted across the woman's face. For a moment she looked almost furtive, like she’d been caught pilfering cookies. She smoothed her features, making Tom wonder if he'd imagined it. “There was an incident with some prisoners. One of them got shot.”
Tom frowned. He'd assumed all the prisoners were in the gymnasium. As he reached the bottom of the stairs, though, he saw more than a dozen figures in burgundy uniforms lined up in the corridor ahead. They were all on their knees with fingers laced behind their necks.
All but one. A man lay sprawled in the middle of the corridor, facedown, his arms and legs splayed out at awkward angles. A man stood over him with a laser rifle. Half a dozen more spacers watched the rest of the prisoners.
Tom walked forward, simultaneously revolted and baffled. “What the hell is going on here?”
The closest spacers glanced at him, and he saw the same expression he'd glimpsed on the woman's face. Whatever they were doing, they weren't exactly proud of it.
The exception was the man who stood over the dead prisoner. He was older than Tom by at least ten years, with the single bar of a lieutenant on his sleeve. The look he gave Tom was all defiance. “We had to shoot a prisoner.”
The brand-new military of New Panama had very few hard and fast rules regarding etiquette. Some informal rules were evolving, though. Tom had grown accustomed to being addressed as “Captain”, “Commodore”, or “Sir”. He couldn't reprimand this man for skipping the formalities, but it was hardly an encouraging sign.
“What's your name, Lieutenant?”
“Hamilton. I was on the Aurora.”
The whole navy was organized into teams based on who had served together on a ship before the war. If Hamilton was from the Aurora, so were all the spacers in the corridor.
Tom said, “I thought all the prisoners were in the gymnasium.”
Hamilton shrugged. “There's pockets all over the ship. We've been collecting them.” He nodded at O'Reilly. “His orders, I believe.”
“All right,” said Tom, and looked at the corpse. “What happened?”
“We ordered them all to kneel,” Hamilton said. He pointed with his foot, not quite nudging the dead man in the ribs. “This one stood up.”
“So you shot him?”
“They have us outnumbered,” said Hamilton. “We let them ignore orders, we'll end up with a real problem.”
That sounded cold-blooded to Tom, but he decided not to object. He was here. I wasn't. I won’t second-guess him. Still ….
Tom walked to the closest living prisoner and knelt. It was a woman, her head slumped. When his knees appeared in her circle of vision she lifted her head. Her eyes were wide in a bloodless face, and she leaned away like she thought he would strike her.
“What happened here?” said Tom.
She glanced at Hamilton, and then looked down without speaking.
“You won't be harmed,” said Tom. “You have my word.”
Slowly, hesitantly, she lifted her head and met his gaze.
“I need you to tell me what happened.” He was insulting Hamilton pretty badly by not accepting his word, but a man was dead and Tom figured he had a duty to be sure he knew the facts.
“We were in the chart room,” she said. “Your soldiers herded us all in there, and then they left a man outside the door. He said he'd shoot anyone who came outside.” Her voice trailed off.
“Go on.”
“Well, then these guys came along.” Her head turned left and right, indicating Hamilton and his squad. “They told the other man he could leave. They brought us out here, one at a time.” Her tongue touched her lips, and she swallowed nervously. “Bud was scared. He thought they were going to kill us all. He kept hanging back until it was just him and me.”
Her eyes filled with tears, and she hung her head. “I had to pull his fingers loose from my arm before he let me come out here. I got down on my knees like they said. And then I heard them ordering him out into the hallway.”
Hamilton said, “We didn't do anything wrong.”
Tom silenced him with a look. To the woman he said, “Go on.”
“He came out. He was shaking. He kept pleading with them not to kill him. They made him kneel, but then he got up again. He was backing away with his hands up, saying don't shoot me, don't shoot me…” Her voice trailed off.
“And then they shot him?”
She nodded.
“We told him to get down,” Hamilton said. He sounded smug, almost bored. “We told him again and again.”
Tom straightened up, frustrated and angry. He realized his fists were clenched, and made himself straighten his fingers. “Get them on their feet,” he said. “Take them to the gymnasium.”
“Actually,” said O'Reilly, “we've been moving the prisoners to Four Twenty-two. It's the crew bunkrooms. There's only a couple exits, and there's beds and bathrooms. There's even a little kitchen.”
“Fine,” said Tom. “Take them there.” He looked at O'Reilly. “We'll come along to make sure there's no more unfortunate incidents.”
Hamilton said, “We should get them to move that.” He indicated the corpse. “And clean up the blood.”
“You can do that yourself,” Tom snapped. “You made it happen.” He glared at Hamilton. “You'll treat the body with respect, too.”
Hamilton glared back at him, then turned and followed the straggling, subdued line of prisoners.
Tom walked behind him, staring at the back of Hamilton's head. What the man had done wasn't criminal, exactly. Not that the New Panama Navy had procedures or rules of engagement for situations like this. If this had happened on a United Worlds ship, there would be an investigation. Hamilton would likely get a reprimand, but no prison time.
He was guilty of poor judgement and brutal indifference, not murder.
Hamilton looked over his shoulder. “You've got hold of the wrong end of the stick, Commodore.” He slowed until he was walking beside Tom. “We're at war. And so far, we're on the losing side.” He gestured around at the battleship. “You're used to serving on ships like this, with lots of power and lots of personnel and all the infrastructure that goes with it. But these are the colonies. The only time we get ships like this is when we steal them.”
Tom didn't answer, didn't look at him.
“We learn pragmatism in the colonies,” Hamilton said. “High principles are lovely and all, but when the pressure’s on, you have to be practical.” He gestured at the prisoners. “What do you think is going to happen to them?” He sneered. “One of two things, that's what. They'll die when we get to Novograd. This ship will be destroyed. They'll die, we'll die, and it won't matter in the slightest if we took good care of them for a week in the meantime.”
Tom ground his teeth together, not speaking.
“Or,” said Hamilton, “they'll be liberated. Even if they don't want to fight anymore, they won't have a choice. They’re trained naval personnel. They'll be back on other Dawn Alliance ships in no time. They will make our enemy stronger. We'll have to fight them again.”
“We don't kill prisoners,” Tom said.
“They kill us!” A red flush spread across Hamilton's face. “They invade our colonies. They destroy our ships. They kill people. They hold almost the entire Green Zone, and so far we're doing a shit job of driving them out!”
“We won't sink to their level.”
“Bullshit!” Hamilton looked every bit as furious as Tom felt. “We've already sunk! We sit back and watch while they invade our homes and kill our families. How much lower than that can you get?”
Tom stared at him, certain the man was wrong but not knowing how to articulate it. He couldn't just order the man to change his attitude. Independence ran too deep in the colonists' psyche.
“Everything that reduces our effectiveness has a cost.” Hamilton was calm now. “Everything that helps the enemy has a cost. Right now, the civilians on Novograd are paying that cost. When they finish retooling the factories in the colony and start producing guns and ammunition, the rest of the civilians in the Green Zone will pay the cost as well.”
The look Hamilton gave Tom was cold and bleak and tired. “If shoving all these prisoners out an airlock will help our mission even the tiniest bit, then that's what we need to do. Because if we don't take out that space station, we’re not retaking Novograd. And if we don't get Novograd soon, we'll never get the Green Zone back.”
Tom made a thorough inspection of the detention wing, as it was becoming known. It was crowded; there were more prisoners than bunks. They would have to sleep in shifts. It was not unendurable, and each prisoner could wander freely through the wing. In addition to bathrooms and showers and the kitchen there were several small recreational rooms and a little arboretum with live plants. All in all it was far more humane than anything Tom had encountered as a prisoner of the Dawn Alliance.
Satisfied that the prisoners were not being abused, he had the guards take him through their security procedures. These were being put together on the fly, but they seemed adequate. The detention wing had only two exits, and the colonists had installed magnetic locks on the outside. Each exit opened onto a section of corridor with emergency pressure doors thirty or forty paces away. Technicians were busy installing magnetic locks on those doors as well. A jail break wouldn’t get far.