Bound by Blood

by Terry Mixon

  Jahoda was silent for several seconds.

  “I can’t say for sure, sir,” he admitted. “I’m from Warsaw, on Earth. I’ve served on Mars, but once we head past there, it’ll be the furthest I’ve ever been from Earth.”

  That would be somewhat unusual for a cruiser captain, as Brad understood it, but not entirely out of the question. Which, of course, was why the Commonwealth was in the trouble it was in.

  “That might be something we’ll want to look at once this is over,” he said aloud. “Maybe even make sure every captain does a tour out beyond the Belt.”

  “That makes sense to me, sir,” Jahoda confessed. “Right now, though, I’m just glad to see Mars looking hale and hearty as ever. Eternal and her sisters are always a sight for sore eyes.”

  Brad chuckled bitterly and was about to make a comment about Immortal when a data tag flashed up on Eternal’s icon on his screen.

  “What the Everda—”

  The sudden spike of radiation had drawn the attention of Incredible’s sensors as well as her Admiral, which meant that Brad had a perfect view as the Commonwealth battleship Eternal exploded.

  Chapter Ten

  Incredible’s bridge and flag deck were shocked to silence for several seconds, then Brad swallowed.

  “Captain Jahoda, get your tactical team on that right now, if you please,” he ordered gently. “I need to know what happened to Eternal.”

  He turned to his own staff, a set of officers and analysts he barely knew the names of.

  “Lieutenant Commander Abelli, please start working up a course to get the task force into Mars orbit as much faster as reasonably possible,” he told Lieutenant Commander Wawatam Abelli, the task force operations officer. The young dark-haired man from North America got to work instantly.

  “Lieutenant Commander Walter, get the rest of the task force on the coms and take us to full stealth,” he continued, turning his attention to Lieutenant Nikolaj Walter, the task force systems officer. The blond German officer nodded and grabbed his headset.

  “Lieutenant Commander Werner.” He turned to the only woman among his three staff officers. Jan Werner handled logistics and coms for him, both of which had changed the rules on him. “Coordinate with…whoever is in charge now. I need to know we can still restock and refuel without interruption. If you can get us a sensor feed from the Deimos Array, that could buy us some more data.”

  All three of his officers were head-down in their consoles and conversations with their staff in moments, and he turned his attention back to Jahoda.

  “Stealth mode, if you please, Captain,” he said quietly.

  “Already engaging,” Jahoda told him. “We won’t hide much. We’ve been visible to anyone who wanted to look for days. Adjusting our course will help but also makes us easier to detect.”

  The stealth mode on a modern fleet ship—or Oath of Vengeance, for that matter—had three components. The first was that the hulls of the ships were already coated in radar-absorbing paint and designed for low radar profiles. The difficulty in targeting with radar and lidar was part of why the effective range of their weapons was so low.

  The second aspect was a series of heat sinks that could absorb almost all of the ships’ heat production for up to twenty-four hours. More could be gained by using the third aspect and directionally venting heat at an angle you knew to be safe.

  It wasn’t perfect, but neither were the sensors available to them or their enemies. With them still over thirty hours’ regular flight from Mars, it would hide them from anyone who wasn’t looking right at them.

  “What in Everdark is going on, Captain?” Brad asked grimly. “That looked like a fusion core overload.”

  “It wasn’t,” Incredible’s Captain replied. “We’re still validating, but it looks like bombs. Fusion warheads in the fifty-megaton range, at least four of them.”

  “Someone snuck thermonuclear weapons aboard a battleship?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Confirm that, Captain,” Brad snapped. “Werner, get me the Commodores. Including Hunt, if you please.”

  He turned back to Jahoda.

  “Keep me updated on what you…”

  “Weapons fire!” someone on the bridge yelled, and Brad swallowed as he turned his attention back to the tactical display.

  “Who’s shooting?” he demanded.

  There was silence on the channel as the computers calmly drew in what they could detect and resolve. No hostile icons were being added to the display, no one in Brad’s task force was picking up enemy ships…but Fleet vessels were disappearing.

  “Fleet is, sir,” Jahoda said very, very quietly. “Multiple vessels have opened fire on the rest of the Fleet ships in orbit.”

  Brad was silent for a long time.

  “Sir?” Werner finally said behind him. “I have the Commodores for you.”

  He swallowed and nodded.

  “I’ll take it in my office,” he told her. “Keep me in the loop as soon as we know anything, Captain Jahoda.”

  The three women on the wallscreen in Brad’s office looked various degrees of shaken. The worst was Commodore Bailey. No real surprise there, given that her previous command had just gone up in a giant ball of fire.

  “Someone snuck four nukes aboard Eternal,” Brad told them flatly. “The only reason my first guess isn’t the Cadre is because the Cadre is now, apparently, Outer Worlds Intelligence.”

  “Same murderous fuckheads, different business cards,” Bailey said harshly. “And what the fuck are we doing about it?”

  “Right now, trying to work out what in Everdark is going on,” he replied. “The last scans I saw showed the Martian Squadron opening fire on each other. I have no idea what’s going on in Mars’s orbit, and I’m hesitant to take this task force into it until I do know.”

  “You know these people better than any of us, Bailey,” Nuremberg said. “Any clues?”

  “Cadre infiltrators,” Eternal’s former commander told them. “Or OWI, whatever we want to call them. They always did a surprisingly good job of finding the people who could be blackmailed or bought—it’s where their bloody ‘Independence Militia’ came from.”

  “And since we now know they’d have had full access to the Fleet’s personnel records through the Secret Service, that makes more sense than it used to,” Brad said grimly. “But still, enough infiltrators to turn half of the Martian Squadron on the other half?”

  “Get the right hands in the right places and you can sneak an assault force aboard any ship,” Michelle pointed out. “Even a cruiser can be taken by as little as a platoon if they have surprise and proper prep.”

  “What about the fixed defenses?” Nuremberg demanded. “They should be doing something!”

  “Doing what?” Brad asked. “For that matter, what could we do if we were there? Do you have a way to tell who are the mutineers and who are the loyalists?”

  The videoconference was silent.

  His wrist-comp pinged.

  “Madrid,” he answered.

  “Sir, we have Deimos Command for you,” Werner told him. “Should I hold them until you’re done?”

  “No,” he replied. “Keep the Commodores on the line, but don’t let Deimos Command know they’re listening in. Then patch them through.”

  He turned to the women already on the call.

  “Bailey, if whoever is on this call isn’t who they’re supposed to be, let me know ASAP,” he ordered. “If I have to take Deimos and the orbital defenses away from the Cadre, this war just got a lot uglier.”

  All three women slid to the side of the screen, and the image of a command center appeared in his screen. There was a strong resemblance to Incredible’s flag deck, but the room was built with more space and more responsibilities.

  “This is Commodore Talgat Saltanat at Deimos Command,” a swarthy and broad-shouldered man greeted him. “Rear Admiral Madrid, thank the Everlit you’re here.”

  “We’re still almost thi
rty hours away, Commodore,” Brad pointed out. “I don’t think I’m doing much more than cleanup. What in Everdark is going on?”

  “I don’t know for certain, but a number of our crews appear to have mutinied and seized their ships,” Saltanat told him. “From what I can tell, our loyalists have the numerical edge, but fighting continues on half the ships that are still under our control.”

  “Can you identify the mutineers?” Brad demanded.

  “Some of the ships, at least,” the Commodore confirmed. “The loyalists are still in my tactical net, but that net would block any attempt to fire at a Fleet vessel without counter-authorization from here. The mutineers had to cut free to launch their attack.”

  So, there was no guarantee that the ships in the network were loyal, but everyone who’d cut themselves off was a mutineer.

  “Are you going to engage with the fixed defenses, Commodore?” Brad asked gently.

  Saltanat winced as if struck, then sighed.

  “I was trying to avoid that, sir,” he admitted.

  Brad glanced over at Bailey’s image, and the blonde Commodore gave him a grim thumbs-up.

  “My authority, Commodore Saltanat,” Brad said grimly. “Summon any ship that’s severed themselves from the tactical network to surrender. You are to engage and destroy any that refuse; do you understand?”

  He swallowed, and then slowly bowed his head.

  “I understand, Admiral Madrid.”

  The only reason the mutiny had lasted even this long was because it had taken time to identify which ships were a problem—and then because Commodore Saltanat had hesitated.

  Brad could understand that—even the ships that were apparently entirely in enemy control almost certainly had prisoners aboard—but there was no way they could rescue those people.

  Saltanat controlled more firepower from that one room on Deimos than the rest of the Martian Squadron combined now that Eternal was gone. His surrender demand alone should have been enough to end the fighting.

  It wasn’t.

  Brad was keeping track as the message went out. It was received. And the fighting continued. Another destroyer cut itself from the tactical network even as Saltanat’s message was arriving, firing into a sister ship at point-blank range.

  Every second was costing lives and Brad responded to the Commodore’s pained look with a simple nod.

  And then nothing happened.

  “Commodore?” he asked.

  “We’re trying, Admiral,” Saltanat told him. “We got weapons lock and then…nothing. Our systems are refusing to engage. We’ve lost our sensor locks and none of our remote weapons are responding at all.”

  The Commodore winced.

  “Nothing on Deimos is reporting in, either. It’s like our entire weapons control software just wiped itself.”

  “That’s entirely possible,” Brad said grimly. “Find out, Commodore. Get your weapons back online.”

  He looked at his people as he muted the link to Deimos.

  “I’m guessing everything looks intact?” he asked.

  “Looks it,” Bailey confirmed. “I don’t know how far I trust that little—”

  “Every sensor in the defensive network went down as he was trying to fire,” Nuremberg told them. “He’s not lying. Someone had a time bomb ticking away in Deimos Command’s software.”

  “Blackhawk,” Michelle breathed.

  Brad nodded as he met his wife’s eyes.

  “I don’t know if you two are familiar with the Battle of Blackhawk Station,” he said to the two Fleet Commodores. “The Cadre used a virus to disable the Station’s fixed defenses, allowing them to send in a force that was almost entirely landing ships rather than the warships they’d have needed to break through.”

  “More than that,” Michelle pointed out. “That was their backup plan, Brad—Admiral.”

  It hit him like a ton of bricks.

  “Everlit preserve us,” he murmured.

  “Admiral?” Nuremberg demanded.

  “At Blackhawk Station, the Cadre used the virus to hide an approaching fleet. Disabling the defenses was the second string to their bow. The first string was getting in undetected in the first place.”

  The conference was silent.

  “Fuck stealth,” Brad finally swore grimly. “Every ship goes active with every sensor they’ve got. If there’s a ship within a goddamn light-minute of Mars, I want to know about it yesterday.”

  The result didn’t surprise him when it came in. There would be questions later around how the Outer Worlds Navy had pulled it off, where they’d refueled, how they’d got them even that close without being detected, but it was no surprise when they found the fleet.

  “Forty-eight bogeys on course for Mars,” Jahoda reported to the flag conference call grimly. “Still breaking down classes, but we’ve got at least four that are either cruisers or carriers.

  “They’re maybe twenty hours out. I’m betting they were counting on the fixed defenses’ problem not being noticed for a while yet.”

  “I’m not,” Brad said grimly. “Assume that the fixed defenses won’t be online for at least twenty-four hours. The Martian Squadron will have smashed themselves to pieces by then. What can they do?”

  “They can’t take Mars,” Bailey said flatly. “Not without a few hundred thousand troops, and that flotilla isn’t big enough for that. They could wreck the fixed defenses before they come back online or…”

  “Or they could punch through whatever’s left of the Martian Squadrons and whatever’s online of the orbital defenses and land on Deimos,” Brad pointed out. “There’s, what, a thousand Marines on the moon?”

  “If even,” Bailey told him. “Everlit, Madrid…”

  “And if they take control of the orbital defenses, they might not control Mars tomorrow…but no one else will be able to relieve Mars in time to change anything,” Brad concluded. “I don’t see many options on our side, do you?”

  Silence answered him.

  “Get your navigation departments talking to each other,” Brad ordered. “I want us on a course that will intercept the bastards short of Mars in ten minutes.

  “Understood?”

  Chapter Eleven

  There was no subtlety available to Task Force Seventeen now. To intercept the Outer Worlds force before they reach Mars, the Fleet force had to accelerate at maximum.

  Brad studied the vectors as they moved, and shook his head. They’d have bare minutes in weapons range of the enemy force. He had enough of an advantage in firepower and tonnage to make that a winning proposition, but it still meant that Mars was vulnerable.

  It would take him an extra day to get into Mars orbit after the fight, but the OWN fleet would be there six hours after they clashed. That eighteen-hour gap worried him.

  “If we can’t take them out in the firing pass, the Martian Squadron is going to have to deal with them alone,” Michelle told him quietly.

  They had a private channel in the middle of the battle preparations. Brad was now at the point where it was down to his subordinates to execute his orders, and Michelle had one ship. Oath of Vengeance could fight above her weight class, but she didn’t require that much attention from her Commodore in the hours before a battle.

  “We should be able to do enough damage to let the Squadron handle the leftovers,” he told her. “We can’t count on Deimos Command to get the remote platforms back online, but I expect the Commodore to get Deimos’s guns in action.”

  He smiled coldly.

  “I wouldn’t want to tangle with those mass drivers, and I’m perfectly happy to let the OWN throw themselves at them.”

  “That’s still a risk,” Michelle said quietly. “There is another option.”

  He looked at the screen she was on and at the mercenary warship behind her. The back wall of Oath of Vengeance’s bridge was emblazoned with a larger-than-life-sized mural of a Viking warrior: Vidar, the old Norse silent god of vengeance.

  The symbol of his merc
enary company.

  “Where are the Vikings?” he asked. “What about the Goldmisers and Harding’s people?”

  His wife grinned.

  “Vikings can get to Mars about two hours before the OWN flotilla will,” she told him. “Harding’s Guardians are coming in from a different angle; they’ll get there earlier. Our Vikings could actually come into our little scuffle if we asked them to.”

  “We can’t,” Brad replied. “We’ve been playing fast and loose with loopholes already. I can’t order the Vikings to directly engage an Outer Worlds force.” He sighed. “I probably should order Oath of Vengeance out of the line, for that matter.”

  “Anyone wants to tell me I shouldn’t go into battle alongside my husband can go fuck themselves,” she said harshly.

  “The Guild isn’t any more sure of who the bad guys are in Mars orbit than we are,” she continued after a moment. “Doesn’t help that Commodore Saltanat ordered a full lockdown of civilian shipping to keep the situation under control. The Goldmisers can’t leave dock without violating a Fleet order.”

  Brad considered the situation. Those extra destroyers could save Mars, but the Guild was still officially neutral. On the other hand, it would still be almost six hours before the two fleets opened fire on each other.

  “I think I need to talk to Factor Kernsky,” he said aloud. Sara Kernsky was an old friend of his, the Guild Factor who’d first brought him into the Guild…and now a senior Guild Factor on Mars.

  “You should have her contact information,” Michelle told him. “I’ll forward it over anyway. Just to make sure they haven’t changed it on us.”

  “Thanks, my love,” Brad said. “As usual, you’re the clever one.”

  She was still laughing when she closed the channel to let him call Mars.

  Brad knew Mercenary Guild protocol well enough by now to know that the number he’d been given should have connected him to a receptionist. It would have been Sara’s own receptionist, a trained bodyguard and security professional trusted to screen the Factor’s calls, but it shouldn’t have put him directly through to her.