Coalition Defense Force Boxed Set: First to Fight

by Gibbs, Daniel

  A light shined in his face. He turned to it and saw Felix's face, barely visible at the edge of the light. "It's bad, Jim," he said. Henry could see Felix was gripping the bar for zero-G use along the upper wall of the corridor.

  "What happened?"

  "A ship jumped two hundred thousand kilometers out. Before we could do anything, it fired some type of EMP gun. The whole ship went dark." Felix's voice was deceptively calm. He knew full well the stakes they were facing.

  "That's what the League did to the Kensington Star," Henry said. "Dammit. Do we know what's going on in engineering?"

  "Brigitte's heading there now," Felix said. "Piper's getting her gun, and she'll send Cera back to the bridge." He took Henry's hand and pressed a flashlight into it. "I'm doing flashlight and softsuit patrol."

  "Keep it up. Get everyone armed too." Even as he spoke, Henry didn't see what it mattered. Without internal comms, the League could blow its way into any of the airlocks or even breach through the hull, and they wouldn't know where until they heard the blast. Holding the ship against League Marines would be the fight of their lives in ordinary circumstances. Doing it with no communication across the ship was a hopeless cause.

  No. Don't let the fear take you, Henry admonished himself even as he made his way to his office. Make them earn it. The layout there was so familiar to him that he didn't need the flashlight to get the family rifle from the wall. He checked it and was relieved to see that the EMP, whatever it was, hadn't disabled the rifle. The same was true for his pistol, which he slipped into the holster on his hip, thankful that he'd lain down dressed and ready.

  Once back in the corridor, he nearly bumped into Cera as she glided by him. She squinted as the beam of his flashlight played over her face. "Ah, Cap'n, please don't blind me. I'm awake, for Christ's sake."

  "Sorry." He lowered it. "Didn't see you coming."

  "Aye, that's the problem, isn't it?" With her lilt going full force, "isn't it" sounded like "innit." "If Pieter an' th' new girl can get power back, I'll be ready t' burn everythin' we've got."

  "Good." He pulled himself to the side and let her head to the bridge. With flashlight in hand, he journeyed down the hall. Moving through zero-G was always tricky. It was something one had to train for, adapt to. Henry mused that the earliest generations of space-going humans would have laughed at him over needing to deliberately think through the movements they could do in their sleep.

  The next figure to cross his flashlight beam was Miri as she pulled herself from her quarters. "It's them," she said.

  "Yeah."

  Miri nodded. "I'd offer myself, but… they'll take all of you anyway. They probably have a camp ready."

  "We're not going," Henry said, his tone grim.

  "Right." She nodded. "Better to die fighting. Although I'm going to die anyway."

  Henry almost told her that might not happen, but he needed to get to engineering. He heard Miri fall in behind him for the rest of the trip. Inside engineering, only a couple of light beams were visible, both at a supply locker. "Pieter? Samina?"

  "We're here," Samina replied. Henry heard a familiar shakiness in her voice and realized she had it coming from both directions—it was her first time facing such a crisis as a full crew member of any ship, and she'd seen her family's ship destroyed by pirates as a younger girl. "Just… just trying to figure out what happened."

  "It's a weapon," Miri said from behind Henry. "They used it on the Kensington Star. We lost all systems. They only got the lights working again after they took our ship."

  "It was an EMP burst. It overloaded all of our active electronics, blew some of the fuses." Pieter's accent was thickening again, his usual sign of stress. "I've got replacements for vital systems, but we'll need to land."

  "We've got what's probably a League-held ship two hundred thousand klicks away," Henry said. "How long until we've got thrust and the Lawrence drive up?"

  "Shit," Pieter said, "the Lawrence drive will take half an hour to get going, and that's after I spend an hour getting the fuses replaced and the fusion cores going again."

  "We could bring the emergency batteries online," Samina suggested.

  "It's not going to do any good with the fuses burnt out from the EMP," Pieter said.

  Henry was already considering how much time they had left. Two hundred thousand kilometers was not a lot of space to cover when one had a modern sublight drive. Even if the League ship wasn't burning hard to conserve fuel, the Shadow Wolf didn't have long before they were taken. "We need power back. We need to get moving."

  "I bloody know that!" Pieter shouted, frustration ringing in every syllable, particularly the drawn out "oo" in bloody. "But I've got to visually inspect—"

  "Wait!" Samina's eyes widened. "Mister Hertzog, what about the fusion drive?"

  He gave her an exasperated look. "What about it…" His eyes widened. "Oh! Yes!"

  Henry felt a brief surge of hope at the looks on their faces. "What about the fusion drive?"

  "She was shut down when the EMP hit!" Pieter exclaimed. "There shouldn't be any damage, not at all! Just need to fire her up, and she'll get us electricity and thrust!"

  "Enough to jump?" Miri asked.

  "It may take a while for the drive to charge the Lawrence drive to full power," Samina said. "But it should give us time to get the main systems back online. It'll even give us lights and maybe gravity!"

  "Tricky thing is I still need to replace a couple of fuses and modify the systems to accept power from the fusion-drive reactor," Pieter said. "Brigitte can handle fitting the new power cords, but I've got to do the fuses and run the line." He looked at Samina. "You've worked the drive system before, right?"

  "I helped with some of the installations, yes," Samina replied.

  "Good!" Pieter scrambled across the dark engineering bay with little heed to the conditions. Moments later, the sound of metal hammering metal came from that direction, immediately joined by a loud curse in Afrikaans, all while Pieter's flashlight bobbed around. They followed more cautiously while he opened a storage locker and pulled out a long yellow cylinder with a contact end. "Here, a portable battery. It should be enough to power the deuterium and helium-3 tanks."

  Samina nodded. "The reactor has the start-up emergency battery, right?"

  "Of course it does," Pieter scoffed. "Chief Khánh's no fool."

  "I just wanted to make sure!" Samina adjusted her jumpsuit and fitted the flashlight to a loop on her shoulder. Ordinarily, the battery would have been a heavy burden for her, but in zero-G, it was as light as a feather.

  "You! Miri or whatever your name is!" Pieter's flashlight focused on Miri. "You're a spacer now, right?"

  "I am," she confirmed.

  "Then get over here and help me," he said. "Or do you want the League to throw you out an airlock?"

  Miri smiled wanly at that before nodding in acknowledgment. "I do not. I'm at your disposal, Engineer Hartzog."

  Henry left Pieter and Miri to the job in engineering so he could follow Samina. She knew her way around the ship well enough that she quickly found the stairs leading to the lower deck. He followed and marveled at her speed in zero-G. It occurred to him that her work on Trinidad Station undoubtedly included repairs in the zero-G bays of the station's arms.

  Yanik was already downstairs but said nothing as Samina floated past, already huffing with exertion from her rapid maneuvering. "An emergency battery," he noted. The Saurian’s plasma gun, which was more of a heavy assault weapon by human standards, was in his arms, and his tail was hooked around the nearest bar. "There is a plan?"

  "There is. Let's hope we have time to complete it."

  "A little help?" Samina called.

  The two men followed her voice to the hatch for the port stern hold. Samina was straining to open the door. "I already hit the emergency release, but there's something wrong," she said, her fingers trying to find purchase.

  "Wouldn't be the first time one of those things broke down," noted Henry
. He and Yanik each took a side of the sliding door and pulled. It finally started to separate.

  A whistle filled the air. Samina yelped and pulled away from the door. "Vacuum!" she shouted. "There's vacuum in there!"

  Henry nodded at that. "It's intended. But with life support not working, the atmosphere in the rest of the ship should fill it." He had to speak louder to get over the growing whistle.

  Seconds passed. The whistle didn't go away.

  "This seems wrong, Captain," Yanik remarked. "The vacuum should already be weakening."

  Yanik's point was a good one. They could have missed damage back on Trinidad. If the stern holds were exposed to space, they couldn't get the fusion engine going in time.

  A fierce look crossed Samina's face. She set the battery down. "I'll be right back," she said before she kicked off the door and headed in another direction.

  Henry nodded. As she ran off, he glanced at Yanik. "Pretty enthusiastic, isn't she?"

  "I would be concerned if she were not, given our predicament," Yanik replied.

  * * *

  The brave face Samina used when leaving Henry and Yanik vanished quickly. Fear seeped in to replace any bravado she'd felt. It was almost as if God was mocking her for leaving Trinidad Station by threatening to throw her into the clutches of the people who’d stolen the homeworld she barely remembered. The deep shadows of the powerless ship around her reinforced that terrible feeling by the way it struck at the most primordial fears in human instinct. Despite everything, a part of her felt like a monster was going to jump out of the dark at any moment.

  Take care of them. Spacers look after their own. The words of Chief Khánh and her Uncle Ali inspired her to fight off that fear. Her new crew needed her to act quickly.

  Samina's mind dwelled on her task. She was used to moving through spaceships, even in zero-G, and she'd been in a Holden-Nagata model ship before. Whatever changes between various models and sizes, the company tended to have a standard practice for certain things, such as the locations of power output jackets, ladders, stairways, how the hatches worked, and of course, the vacuum-suit lockers.

  Thanks to the tours of the ship she'd taken between repair shifts, Samina knew where the nearest locker was. It took a minute to get there. The design made it easy to open despite no power. Inside were three softsuits and one hardsuit, all blue. Since she wasn't going EVA and wouldn't be exposed to radiation, she went for one of the soft suits. It unfolded quickly enough in zero-G.

  First, she inserted her legs into the suit's bottom half, one after the other. For a brief moment, her right foot caught at the end. The impulse to keep pushing until she pushed her foot through came and went, since that would only delay her. She forced herself to pull her leg back up a little, allowing her to shift her foot just enough to slip through into the magboot at the end. Afterward, she reached out and hooked her feet to the bar along the wall, effectively standing sideways in the corridor. With her legs in the suit, the rest was more straightforward. She removed her tool belt and pulled the suit over her arms. The last step was to move the zippers on the neck and chest to seal the softsuit.

  She reached down to the attached portable life support unit and turned it on. The plastic faceplate had a digital display surface built into it, bringing up the air quantity remaining to her in the corner. The suit had a full set of breathable air, enough to last a few hours if needed.

  She quickly retrieved her floating toolbelt, put it on her waist, and fitted the other tools into pockets on the softsuit. Then she unhooked her feet from the bar and placed them against the floor of the corridor. A tap of a button on the chest control module activated the magboots. There was a soft thunk as they came on and fixed her feet to the floor with a weak magnetic field.

  The advantage of the softsuit, besides the ease of putting it on, was that it didn't impede her mobility in any way and enabled her magboots to let her run in a zero-G environment. She ran through the weightless ship back to the stern hold entrance, where Yanik and Henry were waiting to open the door. "I'm ready,” she said, her voice resolute and sure.

  The two men pulled the door open again. Then the whistling sound came. There was a breach in the hull somewhere, and the longer the hold remained open, the more the ship’s remaining atmosphere would be lost. The moment the door was open enough, Samina squeezed through. The pull she felt through the thin, receding atmosphere of the hold told her the breach was likely along the upper sections just below the upper deck. After giving that a moment’s thought, she turned to bring the battery through. Instead, she found it already moving toward her, Yanik's tail wrapped around it. The tail uncoiled once it was partway through the door, allowing her to take hold of it and pull it through.

  "Good luck!" Henry called before he and the big Saurian shut the door again. The whistling stopped, as did the slight pull. She was alone in the vacuum of the stern hold.

  The holds all had connecting passageways to each other, so the two stern holds were linked normally by a corridor. Khánh's rebuild of the ship for the fusion drive system led her to expand them, turning it into the location of the housing for the fusion drive's reactor. Each hold had one of the two fuel tanks, with the machinery to pump the reactant material into the drive to be used. It was the starboard stern hold, so it had the helium-3 tank. The port stern hold held the deuterium tank.

  For a moment, Samina thought it showed brilliance on her mentor's part. This mixture of reactants didn't require the sheer heat that a pure helium-3 reactor would need, and the radiation byproduct was relatively less than other, dirtier mixtures. Radiation-resistant materials and filters would make up for what radiation was produced.

  No time for geeking out about how awesome Chief Khánh is. Get this job done! Or you'll never see Uncle Ali again!

  * * *

  Outside the hold, Henry waited by himself. He'd sent Yanik to retrieve softsuits for the both of them. With life support down and some of the remaining oxygen lost from opening the hold, they needed a fresh supply of air.

  To his surprise, his commlink lit up. It was Tia's device calling him. He answered, "How is this working?"

  "Piper set my unit up to use its own transceiver system," Tia explained. "It'll drain the battery fast, but for now, I can reach any commlink on the ship. What's our status?"

  "Samina's trying to get the fusion drive going. Have Cera on standby."

  "What about the inertial compensators?"

  "The drive reactor can power some of our systems. We'll give compensators top priority, along with control systems. Everything else is gravy."

  "Roger that. I'm up here at manual astrogation. Nothing so far. I've sent the others to the stern astrogation module and the gun turrets. They can call me with updates."

  "Keep me informed." Henry shut down the call to preserve Tia's battery. I'm down here with Samina and Yanik. Pieter's got Miri and Brigitte helping him. Tia, Cera, and Piper up front. That leaves Felix, Vidia, and Oskar to be lookouts. If they board, we'll be too scattered to fight back. He pondered what to do next. They may not even board. We've got no power, and they think we're helpless. They could just tractor us along.

  He shook his head. Either way, they needed their systems back. Henry resisted the urge to call for Samina to hurry up, even as he mentally counted down the seconds to the likely intercept.

  * * *

  On the Hathaway Clipper, Commander Zhung noted the distance drop below a hundred thousand kilometers. Soon, they would be in range for the shuttles to burn ahead and seize the vessel. Her orders in that regard were strict and straight from Admiral Hartford: take control of the Shadow Wolf as quickly as possible, separate Miri Gaon from the crew, and only then take the ship under tow for return to Pluto Base.

  "The deployment is proceeding well," her first officer, Lieutenant Commander Deveaux, noted. "It looks good for our intended operations, doesn't it?"

  "It does," she responded. "I look forward to the end of the war."

  "I've put in my fifte
en years for when peacetime begins," Deveaux said. "I'm looking forward to returning to Jauresbourg to see my wife and daughter."

  "How are they?"

  "Well enough," Deveaux said. "The SRDB cut the weekly ration by ten percent due to the famine on Gomulka. But they're still healthy."

  "Once the war is over, the fleet can redeploy," Zhung noted. "We can demobilize soldiers and crew and deal with the resource shortfalls more easily. The ration cuts will finally end."

  Deveaux nodded and remained silent.

  Not that Zhung expected him to give an opinion on what would happen. Sometimes, she wondered whether the SRDB would follow through on the promises of the Social and Public Safety Committee in terms of the war, that after the defeat of the Coalition and their restoration to Society, the resource shortfalls would be over. There would be no more need for further sacrifices, and all would enjoy the fruits of Social plenty. But there are always the other threats. The Kelltan and the Oroj are on our borders too. There are rumors about the Jalm'tar Empire to Spinward. Will victory bring us peace? As Deveaux looked to her, Zhung forced the thoughts from her mind and kept her expression straight. Such skepticism had the tinge of anti-Social sentiment, and she'd come too far in her career to let any thoughts hold her back.

  "Time to target?" she asked aloud, looking for work to clear her mind.

  "We're entering the requested shuttle intercept range, tractor range in ten."

  "Excellent." She shifted in her chair and waited to bring this operation to its proper conclusion. "Launch the Marines."

  34

  The empty void was the only thing Tia could see out of manual astrogation. For her, the hardest thing was to keep looking at it. Staring into pitch-black nothingness when her ship was reduced to the same was getting on her nerves. An automatic part of her brain wanted to panic at the entire experience. She fought to keep everything on an even keel.