Honor Bound dhp-2

by Rick Partlow

  As the hatch to Engineering slowly rolled open, a haze of black smoke dotted with bits of particulate metal drifted out of the chamber. With it, she saw as a sense of horror crept through her, drifted a pair of charred and bloodied bodies. She coughed fitfully as the smoke reached her, and she knew that to last in there, she was going to need a respirator. She went to a rack just outside the hatchway and pulled an emergency breather from it, settling the mask over her face and pulling the elastic strap over her head, adjusting it automatically as it tried to yank at her hair.

  Fresh air filled her lungs and she felt relief for the first time in long minutes. Thinking quickly, she grabbed a spare respirator and a flashlight from the cabinet and pushed off into the smoke-filled chamber. Shining the powerful light around the Engine Room, she could see, despite the smoke, exactly what had happened: the main trunklines had exploded with incredible force from the feedback of the second field collision, probably weakened significantly by the first. And when they’d violently overloaded, they’d burst right through the shielding, turning the armored sheaths into shrapnel that had sliced through everything… and everyone… in the room.

  Loose globules of crimson blood floated amid the clouds of smoke and twirling bits of metal like some surreal collage, and at the center of it were a collection of human bodies in torn, bloody and burned blue utility fatigues. She recognized Commander Prieta among them immediately, his dark eyes clouded and sightless. But one of them was still moving…

  Pushing off from the partially-open door, Minishimi caught the drifting crewmember and pulled the spare respirator over her face, wincing as she saw the raw, weeping burns that covered half of it. The woman-Chief Grieger she remembered-stirred and coughed violently as the oxygen hit her lungs, thrashing with pain and confusion.

  “Chief Grieger!” Minishimi shouted through her breath mask, trying to pin the woman’s arms. “It’s the Captain! Can you hear me?”

  “Ma’am!” Grieger calmed down, ceasing her struggling and looking into Minishimi’s eyes. “What… what happened?”

  “We had a catastrophic overload, Chief,” the Captain told her, yelling to make sure she understood. “Commander Prieta is dead. The ship is dead in space and we have rammers inbound-I’ve sent the crew to the lifepods, but if those ramships hit us, their fields will tear those lifepods apart. I need the plasma drive up and running to get them some room.”

  Grieger was probably in shock, physically and emotionally, but she was also a 20-year veteran NCO. Without another word, she pushed off from Minishimi toward a panel set in the far wall on the other side of the ruined trunk line. The Captain waved her arms to steady herself as she floated back towards the control panels, grabbing the edge of the panel to stop as she watched Grieger yank open the panel and pull down a heavy manual switch.

  The switch closed a circuit with a loud snap and the control panel’s displays that weren’t smashed flickered to life, along with the lighting still left intact. Grieger pushed away from the wall and went to the control panel, moving from one station to the next until she found one with working systems. Her fingers flew across the display, and she paused as she evaluated the results, then turned to the Captain.

  “We’ve lost our antimatter fuel pods, ma’am… they all ejected automatically when the circuits blew. The reactor flushed, but I think I can get it up again with the emergency batteries if I can reroute from the blown power trunks.” She shook her head. “It’s going to take a few minutes though.”

  “Get it done,” she told the engineering NCO. “Then get to the lifepods and get off this ship. I’ll be on the bridge-contact me there when the reactor is up.”

  “What about you, ma’am?” Grieger asked, eyes frowning beneath her mask.

  “Don’t worry about me, Chief,” Minishimi assured her. “I’ll be off this boat just as quick as I can program the Helm to take the ship out of the area. I definitely want to live to fight another day.”

  Larry Gianeto looked up as the primary lighting flickered on in the hangar bay, followed quickly by the hum of the main ventilators. He turned to Commander Irvine, the Decatur‘s flight officer, who had been directing his people into the bay’s half dozen life pods.

  “Commander!” he called. “Belay the lifepods! Get your people into the shuttles!”

  “Roger that!” Irvine nodded in understanding. Now that the power was back up, they could use the hangar’s launch locks, and the shuttles could keep them alive longer than the pods. They could also get farther away from the ship, making it less likely they would get caught in the drive fields of the…

  Gianeto’s head snapped around to the access tubes, and he made an instant decision. “Commander Irvine,” he called and the tall, lanky officer looked back. “Get as many shuttles as you can launched, and prepare to bring life pods on board once you’re out. I’m heading to the bridge.”

  Irvine said something, but Gianeto didn’t hear: he was already in the access tube and heading back the way he’d come.

  Captain Minishimi was already on the bridge by the time Gianeto got there, leaning over the Helm station, frowning in concentration. She had, he noted, taken the time to move Francis Wiitten’s body, strapping it into the acceleration couch at the Communications station.

  “I figured I’d find you here, ma’am,” he said as he moved up behind her.

  “Mr. Gianeto,” the Captain said in a disapproving tone, glaring at him, “I recall giving you an order to abandon this ship.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said with a smile. “But when the power returned, I realized we had a chance to get the plasma drives online and move the ship away from the lifepods, give them some room so they have a better chance of surviving.” He shrugged. “I thought you might need some help programming the Helm.”

  “I appreciate the thought,” she said, voice gentler… then she sagged and sighed. “Unfortunately, we aren’t going to be able to do that.”

  “Ma’am?’ Gianeto asked, moving over to the station beside her.

  “The feedback from that field intersection did more than burn out our trunk lines,” the Captain explained. “We had a burn-through just aft of the bridge.” Gianeto winced. If an Eysselink field collapsed catastrophically, as theirs had, it could cause point failures at various spots in the field, which would burn back into the ship like a laser-an antimatter-powered laser fired at point-blank range. “It fried the ship’s navigational computer.” She waved a hand at the Helm display. “We have no helm controls from the bridge or even the auxiliary bridge. We’ll have to rig up something in the engine room.”

  “But Captain,” Gianeto said slowly, realization creeping into his voice, “without the navigational computers, we’d have to maneuver the ship manually…”

  “I’m heading to the Engine room, Commander Gianeto,” she said firmly, catching his eye with her no-nonsense look. “You are to get to the lifepods immediately and abandon ship. That’s an order.”

  “Ma’am,” he blurted, shaking his head, “let me do it. This war isn’t over… they’re going to need experienced captains.”

  Minishimi smiled sadly, laying a hand fondly on his shoulder. “Larry, I’d be a captain without a ship to run. This is my ship, and it’s my duty to carry out.” She jerked her head toward the door. “Get out now, or I’ll choke you out and drag you to the pods myself.”

  “Aye, ma’am.” He turned and headed for the door.

  “Tell my husband I was thinking about him,” she said softly. He nodded in reply, not trusting himself to say anything. He took one last look at her, then he was out the door and gone.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Shannon Stark stepped off the boarding ramp of the combat lander, the weight of her and Marine-pattern combat armor feeling strangely constrictive across her chest, and moved to the side to allow the Special Operations troops behind her to scramble off. They reminded her of a coiled spring, unfolding into a defensive formation around the aerospacecraft, full of youth, energy and an ignora
nce of their own mortality.

  The turbines of the lander whined plaintively as they were throttled down, the waning blasts of superheated air from their vectored thrust nozzles tugging fitfully at the high grass in the clearing that had once been a shopping mall off the interstate in upstate New York. It was late afternoon, but the sun was already low in the sky: the days were getting shorter as autumn progressed.

  Here and there you could see the vestigial remains of the old buildings, where no one had bothered to tear them down, but most of the cleared ground was now landing zone for two dozen Colonial Guard heavy transports and staging areas for four times that many armored personnel carriers. Colonial Guard troops swarmed around the vehicles, pulling security and deploying the heavy weapons, while officers shouted orders… among them Ari Shamir and Roza Kovach.

  “Are we really counting on a bunch of just-graduated CeeGee officer candidates and a few training officers and NCOs to face down 20,000 biomechs?” Tom Crossman asked Shannon quietly, stepping up behind her with his helmet tucked under his arm.

  “They’re all we have, Tom,” she told him with a resigned shrug. “Ari thinks they can do it. Anyway, we’ll have support from the orbital weapons emplacements”

  “Uh-oh,” Tom whispered, “look busy, here comes the teacher.”

  Shannon concealed a grin as she looked over and saw General Kage striding purposefully toward their position, his natural bulk even more imposing in full CG body armor. His helmet was off, carried in his left hand, and he looked more at home than Shannon ever remembered.

  “My people will be deployed at the interstate junction within the hour,” he told Shannon, his voice businesslike but a frown darkening his face. “I still do not like this, Maj… Colonel Stark. By allowing the enemy to array against us, we give them time to prepare, to organize. We should have taken them at their staging area, before they had time to mount the vehicles.”

  “That would have been ideal, General,” she acknowledged, nodding, “except for the fact that their staging area was on the edges of the Montreal Metropolitan Complex and neither the President nor I wanted to be responsible for starting a major battle in a population center when we could avoid it.” She waved a hand around them. “No one lives out here and the only traffic is large cargo haulers. We take them here, in the open, away from innocent civilians.”

  “This doesn’t make any sense to me,” Tom muttered, looking up into the darkening sky. “Sure, he’s got a shitload of those blue-skinned fuckers to throw at us, but what’s the point of driving them cross-country in a fleet of APC’s? He’s just lining them up to be ducks in a shooting gallery.”

  “He is a man out of time,” Kage reminded them. “Perhaps he doesn’t realize the potential of orbital kinetic weapons to wreak havoc in an armored column.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t,” Shannon allowed, following Tom’s gaze to unseen weapons satellites, “but I’ll bet you Hellene D’Annique does.” She shook it off. “Still, they’re coming this way and we have to stop them.” She turned back to Tom. “Tell the lander pilots to take off and get into position.” He nodded and headed back up the ramp into their combat shuttle.

  Shannon reached into a pouch on her thigh and pulled out her tablet, calling up the view from the weapons satellites. “The enemy column is on the road,” she told Kage, turning the screen to let him see the video feed. “Let’s hope Antonov is as anachronistic as you believe.” Her eyes narrowed in a frown. “But somehow, I doubt it.”

  * * *

  Xavier Dominguez strode into the Orbital Weapons Control Center like he owned the place-which, as far as the young Fleet Lieutenant JG on duty was concerned, he did.

  “Mr. Vice President!” The duty officer shot to his feet as Dominguez and the half dozen men of his security detail walked through the front entrance. Not all VPs in Republic history would have been as instantly recognizable, but the handsome, charismatic politician had been a staple of the gossip reports for years. “Sir, I’m sorry we weren’t prepared for an inspection visit, but we had no notice…”

  “That’s quite all right, Lieutenant…” Dominguez peered at the man’s nametag in the dim lighting of the entrance hallway, still not automatically adjusted as the sun set outside its doors.

  “Barron, sir,” the young officer stammered, blushing slightly. “Lt. J.G. Louis Barron.”

  “It’s no problem, Louis,” Dominguez gave the officer his most sincere smile, patting him on the shoulder. “This is kind of a last minute thing. It’s the President’s idea, actually; I’m sure you’ve been kept abreast about the Protectorate attack this morning-tragedy, all those brave men and women at the Lunar base losing their lives.”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Vice President,” Barron said somberly. “We’re ready here, if those bastards try anything like they did five years ago!”

  “Well, see, Louis, that’s exactly why I’m here!” Dominguez clasped his hands together demonstratively. “I understand that there have been several changes in security since this base was overrun by the Protectorate during the invasion, and I’ve been sent to inspect things and make sure that nothing like that happens again.”

  “Well, um, sir,” Barron stuttered, glancing back and forth between Dominguez and the security door behind him, “I can, I guess, go over the changes with you… if Captain Prementer were here, he could… I mean, he’s the base commander, but he was on leave. I mean, he’s been recalled, obviously, with the attack, but he’s still in flight from Antarctica…”

  “That’s all right, son, I know you’ll do fine.”

  “Yes, sir, but the thing is,” Barron looked ready to fold into a ball and huddle in a corner, “technically, I need some sort of clearance from Fleet Headquarters to allow anyone not stationed here into the secure area of this base.”

  “I’ll do you one better, son,” Dominguez smiled ingratiatingly, pulling a tablet from a pocket of his designer jacket. He handed it to Barron and the younger man’s eyebrows went up. “That’s a Presidential authorization to enter any secure facility in the Republic. You can check it on your base mainframe, it can’t be forged.” And it wasn’t… but it had been given to him three years ago. He’d just made sure through the aid of some talented netdivers that it had never been rescinded.

  “Well, yes sir, Mr. Vice President,” Barron said with a relieved nod. “That should do fine then. If you’ll just follow me.” Barron nodded to one of the two armed guards stationed at the base entrance and the man fell in behind them as the officer presented his retina and palm for the biometric ID scanner. Two of the Vice Presidential security unit stayed in the entrance hall, while the others followed their charge into the bowels of the base.

  The thick blast doors slid aside, revealing a blank hallway that Dominguez already knew was lined with a half dozen automated weapons systems, lethal and nonlethal. Barron didn’t mention them, however, which Dominguez found interesting-perhaps the young man wasn’t as naive as he seemed. Instead, the officer was droning on about the history of the invasion and how the Protectorate had been able to take control of both the ground-based defense lasers aimed outward and the kinetic kill satellites aimed downward.

  “To prevent such a thing happening again,” Barron went on, “changes have been made to the system that won’t allow anyone to shut out remote access to the defense network from here without a combination of three biometric access codes.”

  “So, it wouldn’t do the Protectorate any good to simply take this place over,” Dominguez summarized as they moved into the main control room. “That wouldn’t prevent us from using the orbital weapons systems. What if they just attacked this site from orbit, blew it up?”

  “There are backup uplinks at a few other locations that can communicate with the defense satellites,” Barron assured him, “and of course the ground-based lasers can be controlled on-site. The advantage of this place is that we centralize everything and provide targeting based on input from multiple sources. We’re also a fail-safe against someone hi
jacking the system from one of the other sites-every use has to be confirmed here and we can shut out remote use with the biometric access codes: the CO, the XO and a rotating code chosen at random and kept top secret.”

  “So, losing this place wouldn’t cripple our defense system,” Dominguez said, looking around, “and they can’t use it to shut out remote access either.” He nodded. “Good to know, good to know.” He pinned Barron with a glance. “And I assume the systems here are safe from outside computer attack as well.”

  “Yes, sir!” Barron told him, smiling with enthusiasm and obviously warmed up to his presentation. “The core systems here are totally isolated, not connected to any net. The only way to access them is through these stations, physically.” He waved a hand, indicating the stations against the far wall, where the technicians on duty were monitoring targeting data from sensor feeds out in the asteroid belt and Martian orbit.

  “Well, that’s just fine then,” Dominguez said, nodding slowly. He turned to the head of his security team and smiled. “I think we’ve heard enough.”

  Louis Barron turned back to the Vice President, ready to thank him for his visit, but the relief on his face turned to shock when he saw the wide-shouldered, hard-faced security agent aiming a suppressed handgun at him.

  “What…” was all he had the chance to say or think before the weapon fired. Its hoarse cough was the last thing he ever heard.

  * * *