Coalition Defense Force Boxed Set: First to Fight

by Gibbs, Daniel

  She wanted to be angry with Jim for putting them all on the line to save Felix's suicidally faithful brother from Caetano. But every time the sentiment started to build, she thought of the comrades she'd left behind on Hestia and their horrible fates. She thought of what she wished she could have done to save them from public degradation, the beatings, the humiliations, and the deaths of many of them. When she considered it, she found she couldn't blame Jim.

  It helped that it was easy to blame both their predicament and those memories on the same target—the League of Sol.

  Her commlink beeped with an incoming message. As she hit the key to accept, she noted the battery life was down to seventy percent already. At this rate, she would lose power in an hour, maybe an hour and a half. Having the commlink run its own network was too draining. Once her finger touched the key, she spoke, "Tia here."

  "Tia, I think I see something." The voice was Oskar's. He was at the stern astrogation station. "I'm using my microscope back here, and it looks like an ion drive trail."

  "From what direction?"

  "Front. They're heading right toward us."

  Of course they are. "Okay, keep me—"

  "Wait. I'm seeing something… it's not easy to make out, but I think it's smaller drive flares. Like fireflies around a lamp."

  "Keep me informed." Tia cut the line and called Henry. "If Oskar's right, Jim, they've launched shuttles."

  "Damn," he replied. "Spread the word."

  "Right." Tia cut the line to do so and felt for her pulse pistol. She knew the League would do to her what it had tried to do to Brigitte, what it had done to Miri, and it would be no different than what her comrades suffered after their defeat. She resolved she wasn't going to go through that. The last charge is for me, she vowed.

  * * *

  Samina's commlink lit up as she worked. "Kid, they're coming. Shuttles," Tia said. "How's the work going?"

  "It's coming along," Samina answered. She knelt at the battery, tying the backup power cables on the helium-3 tank's pumping system into one of the four output jacks on the battery. She made sure to secure it with a wrench, tightening the connector into place.

  She moved into the other hold and found the big, boxy tank for the deuterium. It was nearly a mirror of the helium-3 tank, including the same pumping system and the same power cables. She grabbed them and ran them back to the battery, her softsuit's magboots thunking across the hold's metal floor. The beam from her flashlight, still shifting around on her shoulder, gradually showed the battery ahead.

  A sudden sharp yank kept her from continuing. She looked back and tried to pull harder, but nothing gave. Exasperated, she followed the cables back to their source—thunk, thunk, thunk—and immediately recognized her problem.

  The cables were shorter than the ones on the helium-3 pump. They wouldn't be able to reach the battery.

  Well aware they were running low on time, Samina rushed back to the battery and started pulling it closer to the deuterium tank. After several seconds, the cables to the helium-3 pump grew taut. They were at their limit. She retrieved the other wires and found that they were, again, half a meter short.

  "Improvise," she muttered to herself, thinking of her work as a fetch tech. Dockworkers and repair engineers faced this all the time. There were ways to deal with it. She'd have to find a way to lengthen these cables. Replace them? No, they're built into the pumps. It'd be a major job. What about a second battery? Is there one that can run these? Or will Pieter need them to bring some of the other systems online? Think, think, what should I…

  Tia’s voice broke through. "Give me an update, kid."

  "I'm having an issue," Samina admitted. "The backup power cabling for the deuterium tanks isn't long enough to plug it in to the battery. I either need another battery or another way to get power to the deuterium."

  "Make it work, Samina, because they're burning in. We'll have League Marines aboard in a few minutes."

  "Right." She drew in a breath in a failed attempt to steady her pounding heart. The helium-3 could fuse by itself… no, the reactor vessel's not built to take that kind of heat. C'mon, Samina, think how you would do this back on the station. The cable's not long enough.

  "So make a longer one," she said aloud.

  * * *

  Oskar's warning of the first shuttle approaching the port midship airlock brought Yanik running. He stood in the darkness and ignored the discomfort of the limited mobility his tail had inside his softsuit. He presented his weapon to the airlock and held steady, waiting for what might come in. To keep the boarders from realizing he had a gun sighted on them, his tactical flashlight was shut off. He wouldn't need it anyway, he reasoned. He would smell the invaders when they came and hear their armor clink against the hull. Visual senses were a human fixation his people didn't share.

  There were times Yanik thought the universe ran on divine humor. God had an affection for irony, certainly. By dodging the draft for reasons of conscience, he led a life that was far more dangerous and violent than he would have seen had he decided not to follow his principles. It was as if God was mocking the idea of Yanik's critics back on Sauria, that only cowards refused the military service all Saurians were called to perform.

  A sense of near euphoria came over Yanik as he waited for the coming attack. It was the physiological response of a Saurian body to the stress of imminent or active combat, to help with their natural predatory instinct. Humans were exhaustion hunters by practice, meant for outlasting their prey. Saurians were built to do the exact opposite, overwhelming their victims at the commencement of the contest. Having the brain active and ready for the action was a boon he had over others.

  A thunk emanated from the airlock, the same one that just a couple weeks before was used by the League inspectors at New Hathwell. Leaguer Marines were coming through, and not to inspect lithium.

  The airlock door slid open, and Yanik fired without warning. Yellow pulses shot through the dark corridors and into the airlock. The Leaguer in the door went down immediately. Those behind cried out and sought cover. Yanik lowered his rifle and squeezed the trigger again, bringing more cries. The enemy soldiers took cover inside their shuttle.

  Bullets shot back at him, precise fire from chemical-propellant firearms, the preference of several militaries for ease of logistics and use. Yanik's softsuit offered no protection. Some struck his body, tearing flesh and drawing blood. He ignored the pain and the growing heat in his weapon and kept firing. It was necessary to buy time, since without the impediment, the Leaguers in the enemy shuttle could easily overwhelm everyone.

  Granted, it would be for nothing if other shuttles managed to latch to the other airlocks or if they failed to get out of there.

  * * *

  "Their first shuttle's already here, Khan, and another one's getting close. Get moving!"

  The warning from Tia rang in Samina's ears as her tool squeezed the clamp connecting the extended power cable to its connector. She immediately pulled it over enough to fit to the battery. The connector slid into place just as it was meant to.

  She immediately got to work on the other cable. Her cutter severed the end of the wire just below the connector port. She took the extension she'd set aside and pressed it against the open, coiled wiring within. While one hand held the pieces in place, she fitted another clamp around it, one that would push the wiring together and complete the circuit. The clamp fitter came on next, and even in zero-G, she put a lot of elbow grease into it to ensure it was secure.

  Once she was certain the connection would hold, she repeated the action to put the connector back on the lengthened cable. Her hands felt as if they were cramping, given the effort she was forcing from them to squeeze the clamp into place. She ignored the pain. This has to work. Allah, please let this work.

  The clamp would not close any tighter. Samina pushed the connector into the battery. She got to her feet and ran—thunk, thunk, thunk—to the nearby manual control for the fusion drive's reactor.
The emergency lever she found would trigger the backup starter battery to life. If she did it correctly, the reactor hardware would order the fuel-tank pumps to start, the battery would power them, and the helium-3 and deuterium would enter the reactor vessel and start fusing.

  If she did it wrong, none of that would happen, and the startup battery's charge might grow too low to be used again.

  "Inshallah," she whispered before pulling the lever.

  For a moment, there was nothing, and with it came the terror of having failed.

  Then machinery came to life, a low thrum filling the holds. The nearby monitor on the fusion-drive reactor came to life, showing readouts from the reactor itself. The fuel entered, and the fusion process was already underway. Plasma byproduct fed into the thrust system, and the resulting energy was flowing into the rest of the ship.

  Samina laughed in excitement. She'd done it. Chief Khánh would be so proud.

  Then the G-force slammed into her and knocked her into the reactor housing, hard. Pain shot through her ribs and belly. She let out a cry of pain and struggled to push herself away, with little success.

  Despite it all, she was still smiling.

  * * *

  Light poured through the dark bridge as the control displays lit up. Cera noted that the fusion drive was already on and triggered the release on the outlet for the plasma. "We're burnin' out of here!" she crowed.

  Tia and Piper had just enough time to steady themselves before the G-forces hit, the Shadow Wolf's secret drive alive and pushing them at high burn away from the incoming League ship. "Well done, kid," Tia murmured to herself while she felt her bones start to turn into jelly.

  "2.5Gs and climbing!" Piper noted. "The inertial compensators don't have full power!"

  "Doesn't matter! Cera, burn us until you're about to black out then throttle back!"

  "Aye, ma'am!" Cera shouted. From experience, she knew her G tolerances were higher than the others. Odds were that she would be the last one conscious.

  * * *

  The sudden G-forces arrived just as Yanik's gun stopped firing. The timing was perfect for him, even as it drove him into the wall.

  Because it did the same to the League boarding team.

  One moment, they were trying to return fire from the airlock they were pinned within. The next, they were being hit by over 2Gs of acceleration. The sudden shock left them debilitated for a crucial moment.

  * * *

  From his place in the upper port gun turret, Vidia was in the best place to take the sudden G-forces, as the turret seat was built with crash couch functionality. It was still a wrenching experience, and it took him a couple of seconds to recover himself, a couple of seconds in which power flowed into the gun turret.

  The indicators told him the weapon wasn't at full power. The shots would only be at twenty percent, far too low to penetrate a starfighter's deflectors but more than enough to blow up an unshielded shuttle.

  Vidia used the controls to turn the ball turret to face the shuttle. He prayed silently for forgiveness from God for the lives he was about to snuff out before his finger tensed on the trigger. The sapphire pulses, weaker than usual, zipped across the handful of meters and ripped through the League ship without mercy. The shuttle didn't explode so much as fall apart, all but a small piece of it still moored to the airlock.

  God save your poor souls.

  * * *

  The destruction of the shuttle did nothing to harm Yanik. The sudden exposure of the deck to vacuum, however, led to the usual problem posed to a ship with an internal atmosphere: violent decompression. A sudden force gripped him and ripped him from the bar he was holding. The same pulled the League boarders, living and dead, through the airlock and into space.

  Yanik had only a couple seconds to react. Instead of fighting the pull, he let it bring him to the airlock door. At the last moment, his tail, defying the limitations of the suit he was in, whipped out and wrapped around the nearby zero-G guidebar. It was a painful experience, to say the least, such that he expected to find out he'd dislocated his tail. But it saved him from being sucked into space, and his grip on his favored weapon kept it from being lost to the void.

  With one arm holding the cannon, the other lashed toward the airlock controls. Yanik's hand smashed against the panel with such force that he worried he'd broken it.

  There was a bit of a whining whirr as the inner airlock door slid closed. The vacuum ceased to pull on him, and Yanik was able to find his footing.

  His tail still hurt, though.

  * * *

  The moment the rear engines of the Shadow Wolf lit up, Commander Zhung knew something was not going according to plan. She barely had enough time to ask for a report before the flashes of light led to the clear loss of the first boarding shuttle to make it.

  The second, just twenty or so seconds away from latching on to the starboard side when the deluge began, suddenly found itself burning toward the rear of the cargo ship. The pilot adjusted, confused and more concerned with avoiding a collision, but it meant nothing, as the sudden acceleration of the Shadow Wolf meant it was soon pulling away from the shuttle.

  "Shuttle Alpha destroyed," Saratov reported. "There's decompression. It's pulled out some of our people."

  "Task Shuttle Beta to pick them up," Zhung ordered. "Engines to full burn! Tactical, fire the EMP gun again!"

  "Charging for another shot!"

  Deveaux's expression was grim. "Their drives are too fast. We'd need someone from Zervakos's squadron to catch up to them."

  "We won't need that if we disable them again. Their second drive will go down this time. Saratov, as soon as you can…"

  "Firing in ten seconds!" he promised.

  "You may hit our shuttles," Deveaux warned. "If they collide with each other in their formation, even with their engines dead…"

  "Then we will remember their sacrifices in the name of Society," Zhung answered coldly. She would not be diverted from the foe Admiral Hartford had sent her to take. "Fire when ready!"

  * * *

  Pieter was ready when the fusion-drive reactor came to life. He had everything set up to restore power to the control systems, communications, maneuvering thrusters, sensors, and the ship's lighting, as well as what power could be spared for the inertial compensators and, given the enemy shuttle hooked to the ship, the anti-fighter guns.

  He also reserved quite a bit of power to help kick-start the fusion reactions in the main cores enough to bring the deflectors online. Since that meant inferior performance in the inertial compensators, he was already braced for the G-forces that resulted from the fusion drive's operation.

  Brigitte, also forewarned, clung on to one of the bars for zero-G movement. "The fuse replacement on the deflectors is good!" she shouted.

  From her place, Miri glanced up. The G-forces were effectively pinning her against the Lawrence drive. Of the three, she was in the least comfortable position. "I'm not done here yet," she admitted.

  "I didn't expect you to be." Despite the intense G-forces, Pieter managed to trigger his commlink. Given the situation, however, he missed the direct line key and hit the open call one, effectively transmitting to everyone on the ship. "Bridge, we have deflector power if we need it!"

  "Understood!"

  "And we'll need it," Oskar said. "It looks like they're charging a weapon for another shot."

  * * *

  Tia heard it. "Cera, evasive maneuvers! Piper, deflectors!"

  "Aye!" both women shouted.

  They both went to work and not a moment too soon, as a crackling burst of electromagnetic energy erupted from their foe and raced across the void for the Shadow Wolf.

  35

  The electromagnetic pulse crackled through space like a deadly bolt of lightning. And it was deadly, in its own way, to electronics and power systems.

  Such was what the League shuttles between the Hathaway Clipper and the Shadow Wolf learned. The pulse rippled through all but one of them, and just like
that, they were helplessly crippled, dead engines and lights, their crews unable to even call for help as they moved on through the void at the speed they'd already attained.

  The pulse played over the Shadow Wolf's stern as it maneuvered "downward" relative to the shot, and was held back by the blue tinge of a deflector shield.

  On the bridge of her stolen ship, Commander Zhung watched, heart plunging into her stomach, as the powerful drives of the independent ship continued to burn and gradually increase the distance from her vessel. She snarled in fury. "Fire again!"

  "Fifteen seconds until recharge complete," Saratov said apologetically. "The device wasn't made for rapid firing—"

  "Then fire when it is ready!" she demanded, her heart pounding. Success in the mission was so close, so close, and those damned individualist spacers were not going to get away from her.

  * * *

  For a moment, Tia was afraid they were doomed, as the lights dimmed and the controls blipped on and off. Then the effect dissipated, and everything seemed to be working.

  "It looks like the deflectors absorbed it," Piper said. “I think we took a glancing blow."

  Tia swallowed. "So if it's a direct hit…?"

  Piper shook her head. "I don't think the deflectors will stop it. They're not getting enough power for full effectiveness."