by David Weber
The Havenite forces were ready. Commodore Charnay’s mobile force was waiting silently at the spot he’d dubbed Point Fusillade, 130,000 kilometers short of Bergen 2 on Swenson One’s approach vector. His ships’ impeller nodes were hot, but their wedges, transponders, and every active sensor were down. With the enemy now only ten light-seconds away, they were effectively invisible.
Of course, they couldn’t eliminate the waste heat from their reactors. But it was highly unlikely the pirates would notice them against the background thermals of Bergen 2’s platforms and busily moving work boats.
Damocles was also ready. Lisa ran her eyes down the status displays; and as she did so it occurred to her that for the first time in her professional life—in exercises, as well as actual combat conditions—her ship was about to go into battle without a single down-checked system. It made her realize all the more pointedly just how hand-to-mouth the RMN’s existence had been.
And not just in equipment, but also in leadership and experience.
It was impossible for her to imagine Charnay dividing his forces, exposing them to defeat in detail, the way the Star Kingdom had deployed her own ships to three separate worlds after the Battle of Manticore. Charnay had experience, and the institutional experience and memory of the RHN behind him in his tactical planning.
In fact, and in contrast, he’d persuaded the pirates to make that very same mistake themselves by sending three of their ships to Bergen 3.
Lisa scowled. Though that one had the potential to come back and bite both sides on this one. Charnay had picked Point Fusillade on the assumption that Admiral Swenson would either hold his force together or would send Loki to Bergen 3. It hadn’t occurred to any of the planners that the Thu’ban-class cruisers might be sent as a group in Loki’s place, nor that they would run with such a high acceleration rate.
And that one small change now threatened the entire operation’s timing. Had Loki been sent, she would have arrived only forty minutes ago, allowing Brigadier Massingill’s people enough time to launch their boarding attempt without giving their targets time to warn Swenson One across the intervening 15.8 LM before the main pirate force reached Point Fusillade. Now, with the faster Thu’bans in play, Massingill had to add an extra half hour’s worth of stalling to get back on Charnay’s schedule.
The good news was that, according to her last transmission, she’d managed to stall for almost an hour so far. The bad news was that Swenson Two had apparently decided that they were only going to open one ship at a time to the tech teams.
Danak Traffic Control had been good about feeding them a steady stream of reports, all of it relayed through communications satellites well to one side of the intruders’ approach vector to keep the com lasers clear of enemy ears. But that roundabout approach necessarily added an extra time delay—not critical in regards to Swenson One’s steady approach, but potentially disastrous with the volatile situation about to erupt at Bergen 3. Once Massingill sent up the balloon there, things at Fusillade were likely to get very hot indeed.
In fact, allowing for the time-delay, it was entirely possible that Massingill had already launched her attack. That even as she sat here on Damocles’s bridge the com signal announcing that Massingill’s commandos were locked in mortal combat with the pirates was crawling its way toward her.
But whatever was happening at Bergen 3, Swenson One was already too deep in-system to escape. Even if its ships went to a zero safety margin on their compensators, Loki would require twenty-three minutes simply to decelerate to zero relative to Bergen 2. At that point, she would be half a million kilometers from the platforms, and 140,000 kilometers inside Charnay’s squadron’s missile envelope.
Obviously, the closer and slower they could get the enemy before they fired, the better. Still, barring some sort of cataclysmic disaster—
The ping announcing an incoming transmission sounded shockingly loud in the quiet. Lisa turned towards the com section
Just in time to see Chief Ulvestad’s eyes go wide.
“Chief?” she asked.
“You’d better view this, Ma’am,” Ulvestad said grimly. “You’d better view it right now.
“Someone over at Bergen Three has just raised a wedge.”
* * *
Orders, Captain von Belling thought sourly, were orders.
Unfortunately, even stupid orders were still orders.
He looked around Copperhead’s bridge, noting every face gazing at nothing and every pair of hands doing nothing. And it was going to stay that way for the foreseeable future.
All because Admiral Cutler Gensonne was paranoid about being ripped off.
Von Belling took a sip from his coffee bulb. Stupid, stupid, stupid. They’d come all this way to be given the most advanced missiles anyone out here had ever seen; and instead of enthusiastically expediting the hell out of the procedure, Gensonne was worried about getting nick-and-dimmed over the cost of the launcher upgrades?
It made no sense. Especially since the whole issue could have easily been avoided. All Gensonne had had to do—what he should have done—was insist that part of the Volsungs’ next payment, maybe a third of it, be the launcher instillation. That way, if the Danak techs tried to pad the bill Llyn would be the one on the hook, and he would be the one who had to argue or suck it up.
If Gensonne had done it that way, von Belling and Adder could be getting their old launchers pulled apart right now instead of sitting out here on half-kilometer tethers waiting for Captain Lucian to decide it was okay to let the techs aboard.
Von Belling would have made it work if he was in charge.
Maybe someday he would be.
“Captain, I’m getting some odd readings from Mamba,” the man at the sensor station spoke up. “Did Captain Lucian say anything about shutting down his reactor?”
“No,” von Belling said, peering at the sensor image that now appeared on his display. Clearly, not everyone on Copperhead’s bridge was sitting idle.
The heat reading definitely showed a decrease. “You sure the heat signature’s not just being occluded by one of the tugs and transports running around?”
“That’s what I thought at first,” the man said. “But the heat output’s been going down steadily for the past six minutes.”
Von Belling frowned and checked his chrono. The last communication from Lucian hadn’t mentioned any problems. “Maybe the techs needed to get at something,” he said. Even to himself the words sounded stupid. “Com, get Lucian on the line.”
“Yes, Sir.” There was a pause. “Sorry, Sir, but the tether line isn’t working. I’m getting a recording that says the system’s having problems.”
“Is it, now,” von Belling said, frowning a little harder. Work platforms like Bergen 3 typically ran all communications, including ship-to-ship, through tether lines and a cell system so as to save radio bandwidth and com laser pathways for tugs and shuttles and others that couldn’t be hardline linked.
Well, to hell with that. A real Andermani captain wouldn’t put up with that kind of sloppiness on Bergen 3’s part, and von Belling was damned if he would, either. “Com laser on Mamba,” he ordered.
“Sir, the laser’s been locked down.”
“Then unlock it,” Von Belling bit out. Ship com lasers were routinely disabled in shipyards to prevent them from going off accidentally and punching holes in equipment, platforms, or random personnel. But this was a special case, and he was an Andermani captain, and to hell with the usual niceties. “While it’s coming up, get on the radio,” he added. “Tell whoever answers to ask Captain Lucian to kindly tell the rest of us what the hell he’s doing.”
“Yes, Sir.”
He turned back to his keyboard, punching himself into the circuit so he’d be ready to chew someone out the moment he answered—
And jerked back in his seat as a flood of static exploded from the bridge speaker.
He jabbed the button hard enough to hurt his finger, shutting off the noise. “
What the hell?” he snarled.
“I don’t know, Sir,” Com said, his words stumbling over each other. “It’s—they say—”
“Looks like a malfunctioning spark-weld on one of the repair tugs,” the sensor officer put in. “It’s about half a kilometer aft working on that barge—”
“Half a kilometer aft?” von Belling snarled. “They just happened to have a noisy spark-welder sitting right where it would kill our radio?”
And in that frozen, horrible second suspicion became certainty. He knew what was about to happen.
Or rather, what was happening right now.
He jabbed for all-ship intercom. “Red alert!” he shouted. “All crew, all departments—red alert. Secure all hatches, and prepare to be boarded.”
The alert klaxon cut off the flurry of curses that erupted from the rest of the bridge crew. Von Belling fumbled for the internal security controls, trying to remember how to pull up the hatch camera. He got it and keyed for the image.
There they were: sixteen heavily armored commandos, armed with heavy infantry submachine guns, computer-controlled soft-slug room-sweepers, and shoulder-mounted short-range missile doorbusters. They were gathered around the hatch, busily attaching what were undoubtedly shaped charges around the edges.
There was no time to wonder where they hell they’d come from, or how this had happened. Once those charges were blown and the hatch was open, Copperhead would be trapped. All the commandos needed to do was pop the boarding tunnel, open the ship to space, and then cut through the maze of decompression doors at their leisure until they reached the bridge, reactor, and impeller rooms.
Mamba had apparently already been taken. Von Belling would be damned if Copperhead fell the same way.
“Helm, get us free,” he ordered. “Full thrusters and whatever else you have to do, but I want those tethers off my ship.”
“I don’t think—”
“Don’t think,” von Belling bellowed. “Just do it.”
“We can’t, Sir,” the helm moaned. “They’re too strong. We can’t just pull away.”
Von Belling clenched his teeth. This whole thing going to hell in a coffee bulb, and now his own bridge crew was starting to come apart? “Then don’t pull,” he said. “Rotate. Spin us around, damn you, and get those tethers off.”
“Aye, aye,” the man said, his voice marginally less panicked. The thruster warning chimed, and on the plot Copperhead’s attitude began to change as the cruiser started a slow rotation.
Painfully slow. Von Belling swore under his breath, shifting his attention back and forth between the attitude readings and the view of the commandos trying to break into his ship. Briefly, he wondered what was happening with Adder and whether it, too, was already aswarm with Havenites. But Captain Schneider was also out of laser line-of-sight, and von Belling had no doubt there was another radio jammer sitting between the two of them.
But maybe there wasn’t one between him and Gensonne.
“Signal to Odin,” he ordered Com. “Dump our data into a burst transmission and warn him that we’ve walked into a trap.”
“Yes, Sir.”
Only it would very likely be too late, von Belling knew. Here at Bergen 3, he was nearly sixteen light-minutes from Gensonne at Bergen 2. Sixteen minutes until the slow lightspeed crawl of his warning made its way across the Danak system.
Unless…
“Helm, how long until we can bring up the wedge?” he called.
“Three minutes, Captain,” the reply came.
Three minutes…and the gravity wave from a wedge traveled instantaneously. Gensonne would know something was wrong, even if he had no idea what.
A small shudder ran through the bridge. Von Belling looked back at the attitude plot to see that Copperhead had stopped its rotation. “Helm?”
“Sorry, Sir, but the tethers are still holding.”
Von Belling smiled humorously. “Then rotate us the other way,” he ordered. “Get us moving as fast as you can, build up some momentum. Snap them, or tear them out by their roots, I don’t care which.”
“Yes, Sir.”
In the boarding tunnel, all but one of the commandos had pulled back a couple of meters. The charges must be nearly ready. “Push it, helm, damn it,” he bit out. “Everyone who’s not doing something else, grab a gun and get the hell to the main hatch.”
“Captain, I’m picking up twenty tugs,” Sensors called tensely. “Coming around from the other side of the platform—looks like they’re converging on us.”
“Of course they’re converging on us,” von Belling said between clenched teeth. Thanks to Gensonne’s money paranoia, the stealth strategy that had cost the Volsungs Mamba was a no-go for Copperhead, and thanks to von Belling’s alertness the slightly less stealthy commando assault was about to fail, too. Whoever was running this circus had apparently gone to Plan C.
Only Plan C would be catastrophic. With all the Danakans’ finesse stripped away, Plan C would be the hit-it-with-a-hammer option. Possibly an all-out armored assault on every hatch, vent, and opening on the ship; more likely a matter of nuclear warheads attached to all the critical parts.
He couldn’t let that happen. Whatever he had to do, he couldn’t let that happen.
“Sir—the boarding tunnel!”
Von Belling looked at the display.
Just in time to see it break at the far end, rippling briefly as the air rushed out of it, then going still and stiff as the Copperhead’s rotation stretched it outward.
And to von Belling’s immense satisfaction, the commandos lost their grip and footing and tumbled out, disappearing into the vacuum beyond.
He bared his teeth in the first genuine smile he’d had in hours. Now if they could just get those damned tugs and their double damned nukes to wave off.
Only that wasn’t going to happen as long as Copperhead was tied to the platform. “Reverse rotation,” he ordered again. If they could just keep stressing the tethers…
“Sir, wedge is forming,” Helm announced.
Von Belling snarled his second smile of the day. Finally. If he couldn’t stress the tethers into mechanical failure, then maybe he could just fly away, even if he had to drag the whole damn platform along with him.
And then, too late, a horrible realization bubbled through him.
Like all visitors to Bergen 3, the Volsung cruisers had been carefully tethered to the platform in such a way that an accidental impeller activation would lay out the stress bands safely far above and below the station.
Only Copperhead was no longer in that attitude.
Copperhead had rotated.
And in the far distance, as the wedge ceiling coalesced across the platform and the inhabited parts of the station beyond it, Bergen 3 began to disintegrate.
Bergen 3…and Mamba and Adder.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
“Well, XO,” Clegg commented, a slightly lighter edge peeking through the glacial calm of her voice. “I suppose it’s time we noticed them.”
Travis looked again at the numbers. Casey was twenty-five minutes past turnover, her inward velocity towards Walther Prime down to under twenty KPS, her range a hundred three million kilometers. At her current acceleration, she would reach zero-range relative to the planet in the next hundred and seventy-six minutes.
“Yes, Ma’am, I suppose it is,” Commander Woodburn agreed from CIC.
“Com,” Clegg said, “let’s introduce ourselves.”
“Aye, aye, Ma’am.”
* * *
“Well,” Captain Stoffel commented from Tarantel’s bridge. “It would appear they’ve finally noticed us.
“Or if not us, then one of the other ships,” Feyman said. Because, really, the intruder’s response to a battlecruiser should have been considerably different.
But at least its identity was no longer a mystery. The cruiser had brought up its transponder beacon, broadcasting its identity in the clear.
It was the sort of gesture that mer
cenaries, and even most respectable navies, no longer bothered with. But like an old wet-navy raising the battle flag, it was undeniably dramatic. It announced a ship’s determination, and its readiness to fight.
And so there it was: HMS Casey of the Royal Manticoran Navy was charging in on them.
“Casey,” Stoffel said in a rather different voice, and Feyman felt his stomach tighten as he, too, recognized the name.
Tarantel had missed the Battle of Manticore, but all of Gensonne’s senior captains had reviewed the records of the battle. Few lower-ranking officers had seen the full details, but as always the rumor mill had taken up the slack.
Which meant everyone aboard Tarantel knew they were facing the ship that had killed the battlecruiser Tyr at Manticore.
The numbers on Feyman’s displays shifted. “Deceleration’s increased by forty Gs, Sir,” he reported. “New decel at two-point-two-five KPS, about a twenty-one percent increase. If it was running at safe margin, it’s just redlined its compensator.”
“Profile change?”
“They’ll reach zero-zero relative to Prime thirty-one minutes sooner. Call it a hundred and forty-five minutes. Range at that point will be seventeen-point-three-million kilometers.”
“Interesting.” Stoffel leaned back in his chair, rubbing his chin. “Any side component to her vector?”
“No, Sir. Still coming straight down the pike.”
For a moment Stoffel drummed his fingers on his armrest. “Well, they’ve got chutzpah, I’ll give them that. I wonder if they really think they can get away with it twice.”
“Sir?”
“Their trick at Manticore was to slide right past Tyr and Odin at Manticore on reciprocal headings,” Stoffel said. “I’m just wondering if they really think they can pull that off again.”
Fey frowned. “But if they want to dodge past us, then why are they decelerating so hard?”
“Maybe they’re hoping to draw us into heading out to meet them,” Stoffel said. “If they can make us commit to an intercept vector they’ll have a lot better look at any holes in the fence they might squirm through. If we don’t accelerate out to meet them and they manage to reduce their relative velocity to zero, we don’t have anything that could catch them if they stick with their current acceleration.”