by Jake Elwood
A murmur of voices reached her as a couple of invaders walked past. She strained her ears, listening as the volume of the voices rose, then faded.
After ten seconds of silence she began wriggling backwards. The surface beneath her changed from greasy aluminum plates to a steel mesh. She could see another room below, with fat tanks containing hydraulic fluid and the pumping system for distribution. She recognized that room, one of the stops she'd made on her maintenance cycles. Central Hydraulics was in Section Ten, which meant she was out of the trap and safe for the moment.
She found a place just aft of Central Hydraulics where three thick pipes ran horizontally, just below the ceiling. She laid sheets of soft insulation across the pipes, then clambered up and stretched out on this improvised bed. The ceiling was close enough that she could touch it with a fingertip when her elbow was against the pipe beneath her. She was, however, completely hidden from below. Searchers might walk by directly beneath her and never suspect her presence.
She opened the satchel and devoured a meal replacement bar. There were plenty of places to get water in the hidden corners of the ship, but she hadn't eaten in days. She wasn't sure if Free Neorome bars actually tasted better than their Dawn Alliance equivalent, but she savored every morsel and licked the inside of the wrapper, searching for crumbs.
Then she took out the data pad. Personal data devices in the Dawn Alliance were invariably monitored. Every recruit knew their messages could be read and their movements tracked by their superiors. Turning on the pad felt like a mad risk. They gave me a gun. And I can't do anything on my own. Rejecting the only help I've been given is probably the bigger risk.
Noreen shrugged to herself and turned on the pad.
A list of messages appeared. There were warnings from the second day of the occupation, telling her that there would be a security sweep. There were directions to a stash of food. The thought of it made her stomach rumble, but the food stash, left for her more than a day earlier, was back in Section Nine.
The last message was stark and straightforward. Are you still alive? I'm sorry I couldn't warn you. They didn't tell anyone what they were doing until they were already sealing off Section Nine.
Did you set up that transmitter? You turned it on too early, and they detected it. If you can set up another one, don’t turn it on until we reach Novograd.
Noreen shook her head. She’d ripped the transmitter out of a lifeboat. They would be watching the lifeboats now.
Don’t try to sabotage the engines. It won’t work. They’ve got booster pods outside the hull. Just lie low for a day or two. Let them get careless. Then we have to do something. We can’t let this mission succeed.
Prickles of excitement danced across Noreen’s skin, mixed with dread. Her nest on the pipes felt less like a hiding place for a fugitive to cower and more like a blind, a place from which a hunter might strike. She brought up a couple of typing circles and swirled her thumbs, composing a quick message.
I’m safe. I’m hidden.
I’m ready.
The battleship had a name now. The colonists, unsatisfied with B19, had started calling her the Icicle. Tom had wanted a proper christening ceremony, seeing it as a way to bring the crew together and boost morale. With the crew running themselves ragged in endless drills, though, he couldn’t justify taking the time for a ceremony. So he’d let word spread on its own until the name took hold. When someone painted a gleaming white icicle on a green background on the wall of the cafeteria he figured that was ceremony enough.
Now, the ship was an hour away from Novograd, and Tom's nerves were stretched as tight as guitar strings. Unable to stop himself from pacing and fidgeting, he'd left the bridge and begun a tour of the ship's gun turrets. He wasn't sure if he was helping boost morale or just making everyone nervous, but he carried on nevertheless.
The gun turrets came in a bewildering variety of sizes. It seemed like a poor design to Tom. It meant the ship had to stock more than a dozen sizes of ammunition, with limited ability to share among turrets. Still, it meant the battleship had the right gun for almost any situation.
“Hello, Commodore.” The gunner at Turret Nineteen was a tiny young woman, delicate as a bird, her head barely coming to Tom's shoulder. He found her standing just outside the turret, waiting for him. The first few gun crews had been flustered by his arrival. Now, someone was clearly calling ahead to give warning.
“As you were,” he said.
She didn't relax one iota from her rigid posture. Maybe that was a height thing, he decided. When you were shorter than pretty much every single person on the ship, you were hardly likely to slouch. “What's your name, Miss?”
“Teagan Law.” She didn't volunteer a ship name, so he figured she was a groundsider before the war. “Would you like to inspect the turret?”
Tom shook his head. “Just tell me about it.”
“It's a four-barrel gun, and it fires five-millimeter ammunition at a rate of fourteen hundred rounds a minute.” She smiled proudly.
“Are you alone on the gun?” Most of the turrets had at least two operators. The extra person could act as a spotter or clear jams and deal with other mechanical issues.
“I share a mechanic with Turret Twenty,” she said, and gestured at the bulkhead beside her. “It's right over there.”
Tom took a closer look at the bulkhead. It was solid steel, with a small hatch set into it. Gun turrets were among the few vulnerable points on a battleship. The two turrets could share personnel and ammunition, but they could be isolated from one another if one turret took a lot of damage.
“Five millimeters,” Tom said. “You're on anti-missile duty, then.”
Law nodded. “Don't aim, just throw a cloud of steel so thick that nothing can get through.”
Tom was about to reply when the sound of gunfire made him drop into a crouch. He heard dozens – no, hundreds of shots. By the sound of it, it had to be several automatic weapons firing at the same time. The sound seemed to come from every direction at once. He swiveled his head, baffled, until he noticed the deck plates vibrating against the soles of his boots. “It's one deck down.”
Law nodded. She'd drawn her sidearm, a small laser pistol that nevertheless looked huge in her fist. Tom started to reach for his own sidearm, then realized he'd already drawn it. The whole crew went armed now, in case of an encounter with the mystery soldier.
“Wait here,” said Tom. He started down the corridor, then hesitated. “On second thought, come with me. There's nothing for you to do here.”
Not for another hour, anyway, he thought as he headed down the corridor at a run. Whatever was going on, the enemy had timed it well, throwing the ship into chaos just before they went into battle.
He found a ladder, gestured to Law to hang back, and stuck his head down to take a peek. He smelled smoke, and blinked as it irritated his eyes.
Half a dozen spacers milled around in the corridor below. A woman took charge, sending people for firefighting gear and telling a man to make sure the air ducts leading out of this section were sealed. Those who held weapons were holstering them, although the sound of gunfire continued.
“It's not an attack,” Tom said to Law. “There's a fire in the ammo tubes.” He holstered his pistol and hurried down the ladder.
The fire, it turned out, was in an ammunition storage bay. A couple of spacers stopped Tom a good twenty meters back. “Sorry, Commodore. No one gets close without proper equipment.”
“Coming through!” came a muffled voice from behind Tom. “Out of the way!”
He turned to see a couple of figures in emergency fire gear barreling down the corridor. He moved to the side, pressing his back to a bulkhead, as two people in bulky suits and helmets hustled past. They stopped at the closed hatch to the ammunition bay, where one figure pressed a sensor against the metal.
“That's hot!” He looked down the corridor toward Tom and the others. “Everybody back.” He waved an arm in a shooing gesture. “Ba
ck past the next emergency hatch.” He indicated the hatch to the ammo storage bay. “I'm going to open this, and it's going to get hot and smoky in here.”
Tom reluctantly retreated, moving aside to make room for three more people in fire gear before stepping through a hatch that slid shut on his heels.
“It's those DA moles.” The speaker was a pudgy young man with a sparse mustache. He glared around, as if daring someone to contradict him. “The ones pretending to be on our side.”
He means the tanker crew, Tom realized.
“They need to be locked up,” the man went on. “Either that, or spaced.”
“That's enough,” said Tom.
The man turned. “Who are you to tell me what I – oof!”
He went silent as the woman beside him sank an elbow into his ribs. “Shut up, you idiot! That's the commodore.”
“Hey, you lot! Don't stand there gawking. Give us a hand.”
Everyone turned, the argument forgotten. A man and a woman came down the same staircase Tom had descended with Law. Between them they carried a vast spool of glittering silver hose, as big around as Tom's wrist. Judging by the way they were moving, the spool had to be brutally heavy. A couple of spacers hurried up the steps to give them a hand while everyone else got out of the way.
“I need someone on the hatch controls,” said the woman as she reached the bottom of the steps. “Open it up fast, and then close it behind us.”
“The hose will be in the way,” someone objected.
“Oh. Right. Just open it and keep it open, then.”
Tom moved to the hatch controls. The hatch had locked itself, detecting smoke on the other side. He overrode the lock, dismissed a couple of safety warnings, and hit the “open” button. He took a deep breath and held it as the hatch slid open.
A wave of hot smoke rolled out, less than he had feared. Tom exhaled and sniffed the air. There was an acrid stink, a blend of hot metal, gunpowder, and plastic, but it wasn't too bad.
A couple of people in firefighting gear, made blurry by the smoke, took the spindle and waved the others back. Tom peered through the hatch, watching as the fire team unrolled the rest of the hose from the spool. A couple of them took the end of the hose and headed into the ammo storage bay.
Someone tapped Tom on the shoulder. He turned, and had to look up to meet the gaze of one of the tallest women he'd ever seen. She said, “A word?”
He nodded and followed her as she threaded her way through the crowd of watching spacers. When they were out of earshot she said, “I'm Captain Vaillancourt of the Solstice.” She touched her ear, which contained a fat communication bud. “I'm doing information coordinating for damage control. Rick says they've got the fire under control. They want to empty the loading racks in the bay, though. There's no telling how much of the ammo is damaged, and there's no time to inspect it.”
“All right.”
“That's not what I wanted to tell you, though.” She gave him a grim look. “There's some pretty serious automatic fire systems in the ammo bays. The bays aren’t airtight, so they use foam instead of inert gas. The foam system could fill an entire bay in about fifteen seconds. But it failed.” She jerked a thumb toward the ceiling. “Someone cut the line that carries foam to the suppressors on this deck. The actual cut in the line is buried under a thousand liters of foam, so we can't inspect it. But it's a hell of a coincidence, don't you think?”
A fire breaks out in a room that contains nothing flammable, at one of the only places on the ship where it could lead to a catastrophic explosion. The automatic fire suppression system fails, and it all happens right before we go into battle. “Sabotage,” he said.
“Sabotage,” she agreed.
“We know there’s an enemy soldier at a large,” he said. “We’re already taking all the precautions we can.”
She nodded.
“If this gets out, someone is going to go after the tanker crew.” He thought about the plump young man with his angry accusations. “That's a fire that doesn't need fanning.”
Vaillancourt raised an eyebrow.
“I want you to keep this quiet,” Tom said. “Just for another hour. After that, it won't matter.”
She nodded. “I figured you might say something like that. That's why I brought you over here to tell you.”
“I need to find out how many guns are affected by this fiasco,” Tom said. “Thank you, Captain.”
Her eyes went out of focus and she lifted a hand, touching her earbud. Tom stepped around her and headed back toward the fire. The tension was gone from his nerves now. All he felt was tired.
Chapter 8
The malevolent bulk of an energy storm ahead of the ship, vast and red and menacing, vanished abruptly, replaced by a rectangle of blazing white. It was not the live view that Tom was accustomed to. The Icicle’s bridge had no windows. It was located deep within the ship, with displays showing feeds from cameras embedded in the armor plating.
Tom would have preferred a window with its corresponding sense of scale and perspective. Still, he had to trust that the portal to normal space was big enough, and was properly positioned directly ahead of the ship.
“Take us through,” he said
“Taking us through,” said Tim Ishida at the primary helm controls. He looked calm enough, but his voice was pitched a little higher than usual. He had to be feeling the tension that filled the bridge like something tangible, like a viscous fluid that pressed down on Tom's shoulders and robbed him of breath. This was it, after all. The assault on Novograd was about to begin.
Gabrielle, sitting at the secondary communication station along the starboard bulkhead, cleared her throat, then hummed. She stood, paced back and forth, then dropped back into her seat. Franz, her second-in-command when she commanded a fuel tanker, grinned at her from the adjacent seat.
“You shut up,” said Gabrielle, and fluttered her fingers in a nervous gesture. “Remind me to never join the military. My nerves can't handle it.” Like everyone else on the bridge she wore a vac suit with the gloves and helmet removed. She plucked at the reinforced panels on her knees, unable to keep still.
The flat white expanse of the portal vanished, replaced by the blackness of normal space. Stars gleamed bright on every side, but they seemed pale and dull after the spectacular storms of seventh-dimensional space.
“I've got a bearing on Novograd,” said Dietrich at Secondary Operations.
“Adjusting course,” said Ishida.
The stars slid up and to one side as the ship made a ponderous turn. The system’s twin stars appeared, one fat and yellow, the other small and dark orange. And then Tom saw the planet.
It was the size of his thumbnail at arm's length. Novograd had more land than ocean. The ship was above the plane of the planet’s orbit, so polar ice dominated the view. The rest was brown, except for a glittering blue teardrop that marked an ocean.
“I can see the station,” said Dietrich, peering into his display.
Tom leaned forward, despite knowing it wouldn't help. They were too far out for the station to show up to the naked eye.
It's not your naked eye. He grinned at his own foolishness. The display on the forward bulkhead was very good, good enough that he kept forgetting it wasn't a window.
“I count nine ships,” said Dietrich. “All of them are gathered near the station.”
“I thought there'd be more,” said Jennifer Smith at Tactical One.
Tom nodded his agreement. Novograd had tremendous strategic importance. Still, the Dawn Alliance fleet was stretched thin, and the station itself was a formidable fortress.
It should be, he thought sourly. The United Worlds had designed and built it. It had plenty of armor and a ridiculous number of guns.
It would be a very tough nut to crack.
Well, the key to cracking a tough nut is to bring a big enough hammer. And that's what we've done.
“Incoming message,” said Howard Short at Communications One. He tapped hi
s console and the bridge speakers came to life.
“B19.” It was a man's voice with a thick Dawn Alliance accent and a strong note of suspicion. “You're considerably overdue.”
Short, Tom, and much of the rest of the bridge crew turned to look at Gabrielle.
“Oh my God.” Her voice sounded high-pitched and frightened, and Tom's stomach sank.
But she closed her eyes for a moment, smoothed her features, and lifted a microphone on a coiling wire. When she spoke she sounded bored and weary, as if the inconvenience of a long conversation was the worst thing she could imagine happening to her. “This is Unit Leader Third Class Jana Carson, primary bridge communications.”
“Your ship was reported lost on-”
“Very sorry to interrupt,” she said, managing not to sound sorry at all. “I will need you to identify yourself.”
There was a long moment of silence. Tom glanced at O'Reilly, who sat next to him at what they were calling the Operations station, basically a duplicate of Tom's screens. O'Reilly lifted an eyebrow. Either the Dawn Alliance was as rule-bound and peculiar as Gabrielle claimed, or else she was deliberately messing this up.
“You are correct.” The man sounded more than a little frustrated, but he kept his voice perfectly civil. “This is Division Leader Second Class Gundegmaa, aboard the station S1. Now-”
“Thank you, Division Leader,” Gabrielle said cheerfully. “I'm happy to report that the ship has not been destroyed.”
Meanwhile, the Icicle was racing toward the planet – and the station – at a very good clip. Tom expected negotiations to break down at any moment. He wanted to be as close as he possibly could when that happened.
“Report, Unit Leader,” said Gundegmaa. “Where have you been, and why has your ship been out of communication for so long?”
Gabrielle launched into a long story about attempting a raid on New Panama, but facing a colonist fleet. She stuck close to the facts, right up until the very end, when she claimed the remains of the Free Neorome fleet had fled in disarray. Tom, listening, shivered as he remembered the battle. It had nearly ended as she described. Very, very nearly.