by David Weber
“You’re sure it’s not someone down on Hypatia trying to screw with our minds?”
“Sir, it’s coming from about thirty thousand kilometers from Yashima. I suppose it could be a Hypatian trick, but it doesn’t…well, it doesn’t feel like that, Sir.” Holečková shook her head. “I think it’s genuine, Sir.”
“Shit,” Yountz muttered, softly enough Holečková could pretend she hadn’t heard. Then he shook himself.
“In that case, I suppose I’d better take the call, shouldn’t I?” He crossed to sit in his command chair again. “Put it up.”
“Yes, Sir.”
An instant later, the image of a sturdily built brunette with remarkably hard eyes wearing the skinsuit of a Royal Manticoran Navy commander, appeared on his display.
“I’m Rear Admiral Thomas Yountz, Solarian Navy,” he said. “And you are—?”
He sat back to wait out the transmission lag, then twitched as she responded barely seven seconds later.
“Commander Megan Petersen, Royal Manticoran Navy.” Her voice was as cold as her eyes were hard. “I assume Admiral Gogunov got my message?”
Yountz’s jaw tightened. He’d wondered what freakish fate had selected Lepanto as that single salvo’s target. But perhaps it hadn’t been “fate,” at all. Yet if she was seriously claiming to have deliberately targeted TF 1030’s flagship—and if she was telling the truth—then how in hell had she pulled it off? And how did she even know who Martin Gogunov was?
Stupid damned question, he realized an instant later. Even if we didn’t take out the ships that launched, she’s got to be at least three or four light-minutes from here, and it’s sure as hell not taking six minutes for com turnaround, now is it? If they’ve got enough FTL bandwidth to relay through some kind of buoy or platform only thirty thousand klicks from here and we can’t even see the frigging thing, she’s probably been in communication with Vangelis the entire time! And if that’s true, who the hell knows what other nasty little sensor platforms are floating around out there?
He told himself he couldn’t afford to ascribe supernatural capabilities to Manticoran technology. The last thing he could let this Commander Petersen do was convince him she could accomplish wonders beyond his imagination.
Of course, what she’d already accomplished was bad enough.
“Who’s Admiral Gogunov?” he asked.
“The maniac who told President Vangelis he intended to murder six million Hypatian citizens in about thirty-seven minutes from now,” Peterson replied icily. “The maniac aboard SLNS Lepanto, which is currently drifting without power and shedding life pods.”
Yountz inhaled. So much for what other “nasty little sensor platforms” were keeping an eye on him. Vangelis could have told her who Gogunov was, but he couldn’t have told her Lepanto’s current condition.
But you already knew that, really, he thought. You knew it the instant you realized she’d deliberately targeted Gogunov’s ship.
“I don’t know if the Admiral is dead or alive,” he heard himself say in a flat tone. “At the moment, I’ve assumed command. So whatever you have to say, say it to me.”
“All right, I will.” She smiled ever so slightly. The expression reminded him of an Old Terran shark.
“The people of Hypatia have decided to secede from the Solarian League,” she told him. “I realize the League denies their right to do anything of the sort. Obviously, my Star Empire and its Allies disagree with that…constitutional interpretation. Until this very day, however, it would never have occurred to me that the Solarian League Navy, that paragon of all virtues, that guardian of everything which is just and true, would undertake a deliberate Eridani violation. Then again,” that smile disappeared into a battle steel expression, “I wouldn’t have expected the SLN to violate the Deneb Accords quite so blatantly, either. I don’t know why I wouldn’t have. We all know what your Navy’s done from time to time in the service of Frontier Security, don’t we?”
Yountz felt his face go dark, but he couldn’t deny her accusation. In fact, he realized, that was the real reason he was so angry. Because she was right about what the Fleet had done in the Protectorates all too often…and about what Hajdu Gyôzô had done right here in Hypatia.
“I won’t lie to you, Admiral Yountz,” Peterson went on after a moment. “My ship is the only Manticoran vessel currently in the system…now, at least. But you’ve already seen what four Queen’s ships can do to a hundred Solarian battlecruisers, and I’ve just demonstrated what mine can do to a single chosen, targeted battlecruiser. I can do it again. I can do it again as often as I have to, but unlike Vice Admiral Hajdu and Rear Admiral Gogunov, I really don’t like killing people when I don’t need to. Not even Solarians who’ve just finished killing two thousand of my friends.”
Her eyes bored into him, and something inside shriveled before their frozen menace.
“I can’t compel you to do anything without killing more of your ships, Admiral,” she said flatly, “and between the two of us, I think enough people have already died today. So here’s my proposition. You take your surviving ships, and you get the hell out of Hypatia. I’m sure the Hypatians will take care of rescuing all your surviving personnel, assuming they can stop trying to save the civilians—the children—the Solarian League is willing to murder to make a political statement. If you don’t want to do that, that’s fine. You’ve got ten minutes to make up your mind. If you decide to stay, then I suppose you and I will find out how many more of your battlecruisers I can take out, one-by-one, until you—or your successor—finally figure out where I really am and manage to return fire. Of course, even when you do, my defenses are designed to stand up to Manticoran missile fire, aren’t they? And, trust me, I’m one hell of a lot faster than anything you’ve got. You can’t find me, you can’t hit me, you can’t catch me, and you damned well can’t outrun me.
“So you make up your mind, Admiral Yountz. You tell me what you’re going to do and whether or not I have to start killing more Sollies today after all.”
HSP Shuttle Asteria
Hypatia System
Paulette Kilgore should have been grounded by Flight Control. For that matter, she should damned well have grounded herself, and she knew it. Tired pilots made mistakes; exhausted pilots made catastrophic ones.
Screw it, she thought drunkenly. There’s nobody aboard but me and John, and he’d be even more pissed off than me if somebody did try to yank us.
“Got something at zero-three-eight,” Sergeant Debnam said, as if her thought had summoned the announcement.
“Like what?” Kilgore asked, automatically swinging the nose to the indicated bearing. The question came out slurred by fatigue, she realized, but Debnam appeared not to notice.
“Dunno,” he said. “Could just be another chunk of debris—God knows there’s enough of that,” he added bitterly.
Got that right, John, she thought with equal bitterness. Four of the last five radar targets they’d intercepted had been just that: debris. The fifth had been a life pod, its transponder as dead as the young woman in the commander’s skinsuit. Kilgore didn’t like to think about how that young woman had died, alone in a dead pod, slowly bleeding to death from her internal injuries. But Debnam had gone EVA to bring her aboard and Kilgore had left her flight couch to help stow her, gently and reverently, in the passenger compartment beside the two skinsuited corpses they’d already recovered.
“Got no transponder, but it’s about the right size,” Debnam continued. “Range…forty-three-point-six thousand klicks. We’ve got an opening velocity of about two hundred KPS.”
“What’s that make our intercept time?”
The question was a dead giveaway of her exhaustion. That was the kind of solution she did in her head every day.
“’Bout…fifty seconds to match velocity at four hundred gravs, then three-point-eight minutes to actually catch it,” Debnam replied.
“Well, let’s go find out if somebody got a little luckier
this time around,” Kilgore said, and goosed the impellers.
* * *
“Should be able to see whatever it is about now, Paulette,” Debnam said four and a half minutes later, and Kilgore nodded.
She didn’t take her eyes off of her own panel, though. The debris field traveling through the Hypatia System seemed tiny and forlorn as the last memorial to the two thousand or so men and women who’d given their lives so that six million might live, but its components were moving across the system at better than 15,000 KPS and spreading laterally at over ninety KPS. That meant it was actually over a million kilometers in diameter—a hemisphere with a volume of almost eleven cubic light-seconds. Despite its spread, the debris was dense enough to present a genuine hazard to navigation, and Asteria’s particle screens weren’t as powerful as those of larger vessels. The good news, if it wasn’t obscene to call anything “good” in the wake of such carnage, was that her shuttle was traveling with the debris. It had been for several hours, now—many of the other rescue craft had exhausted their endurance and been forced to break off after conducting SAR over such a vast space on top of their grueling efforts to evacuate the orbital habitats—but at least that meant the relative velocities weren’t as high as they might have been.
She checked the chrono and shook her head, still unable to process all that had happened. Barely four hours since the Manty admiral launched his sacrificial attack. But during that time, the shattered wreckage—and life pods—of his ships had crossed the forty-eight light-seconds to Hypatia orbit and then traveled almost 11.3 light-minutes beyond it.
Search-and-rescue had devolved on the Hypatians even after the Solly CO—the most recent Solly CO, she reminded herself with vicious satisfaction—had thrown in the towel and headed for the system’s hyper-limit. The single Manty destroyer left had to stay covert, hidden, the sword of Damocles hanging over the Sollies’ head until they actually cleared the limit and translated out.
There were thousands of Solarian life pods far closer to Hypatia, and they were being picked up, too. Unlike people like Hajdu Gyôzô, Hypatians weren’t butchers. But those pods were near enough to the planet for over two thirds of them to make safe, independent reentry; the Manties weren’t, and the Hypatia System owed the Star Empire of Manticore. That was why every single shuttle, like Asteria, had swarmed out to pursue the wreckage of Admiral Jan Kotouč’s slain ships.
So far, according to the reports, they’d actually rescued fifty-seven Manties alive, most from the heavy cruiser Cinqueda. Under the circumstances, that was a near-miraculous number…but it represented less than three percent of the people who’d crewed the four Manticoran ships. They’d also intercepted almost forty life pods with live transponders which had either launched empty or whose passengers, like the young woman aboard the dead pod she and Debnam had recovered, had died of wounds in the end, despite escaping their doomed ships.
There were no live transponders left. There hadn’t been, for almost an hour now. All the active beacons had been intercepted, and they weren’t going to find any more of their star system’s saviors alive. But it didn’t matter. Not to Paulette Kilgore.
To the human eye, the system primary was little more than a brighter-than-usual star at this distance. Soon it would be impossible for any eye to pick out from the debris field’s position, yet that wreckage’s journey was only beginning. Her mind quailed from the thought of the debris’ lonely, eternal trek across the bottomless void. No Odysseus would return to Ithaca from this Troy, and her heart ached as she imagined any bodies they hadn’t recovered voyaging endlessly across the silent, un-winking, uncaring stars. Imagined those funeral lights, scattered across a tomb as vast as the universe itself.
Not going to happen, she thought drunkenly, eyes stinging. Not on my watch. Not on John’s. Any of these people who’re still out here are going home, by God!
She knew that wasn’t really so. She was on the ragged edge of collapse, Asteria was low on fuel, and they were eleven light-minutes from home. Whatever she and Debnam wanted—needed—to do, they had to turn back soon. At least they knew the wreckage’s vector, and System Patrol had planted huge radar reflectors and active transponder buoys in the heart of the field. Maybe the Manty Navy would be able to complete the work Paulette Kilgore would have to leave undone, after all. Maybe. She hoped so. But in the meantime—
“Got it!” Debnam said suddenly. “Coming up on your Number Three now.”
Kilgore looked at the indicated display, slaved to the optical head Debnam had been using to search visually for their target. All she saw for a moment was the dim, almost imperceptible glow of reflected sunlight, but then Debnam zoomed in, and her weary eyes narrowed.
“It is a pod, Paulette!” Debnam said.
“Yeah, but it looks bad,” she replied. Not only was there no beacon, but even the running lights designed to guide searchers visually to it were dead. Nor did their passives detect any EM signature from it at all.
Doesn’t mean anything, she told herself doggedly. Only been four or five hours. Pod may be dead, but Navy skinsuits’re good for a lot longer than that on internal resources, and the pod’s rad and heat shielding’d hide their signatures. If somebody got aboard it in the first place, she might still be—
She chopped that thought off. There was no point fooling herself, and it would only make the inevitable hurt worse. In fact, she found herself hoping this was one of the pods which had launched empty. They had a sufficient honor guard of dead heroes aboard already.
She blinked as she realized that even as her mind had been churning through those thoughts, her hands had automatically brought the shuttle around to an intercept heading and sent it ghosting towards the life pod at ten gravities.
“You about ready, John?” she asked as she reached turnover and flipped to decelerate to rest less than fifty yards from her target.
“Moving into the lock now,” he confirmed, and she felt the pressure in her eardrums and saw the red light blink as the pumps evacuated the lock’s atmosphere back into the passenger compartment.
“Opening the hatch,” he said a moment later, and then she saw him—tether trailing behind him—as his SUT thruster pack carried him across the vacuum.
His handheld tractor-presser unit locked onto the pod and drew him in, and he landed gently beside the inspection panel.
“LED’s dead,” he said over his skinsuit com. “Plugging into the auxiliary jack now, and—Holy Christ!”
Kilgore jerked upright in her flight couch.
“John?” She heard him breathing over the open com. “John?!”
“Paulette—” For a a second, she couldn’t recognize his voice. It sounded so…broken. So hoarse. But then—
“Paulette, they’re alive! Christ and all the Holy Angels, we’ve got two of them, and they’re alive!”
“Oh my God,” she whispered, and realized the strangeness hovering in his voice was tears. And then she realized she was weeping, and that she’d pressed both trembling hands to her mouth. “Oh my God.”
“I’m hooking my tether now.” Debnam sounded much closer to normal. “I’m heading back.”
“Understood.”
Kilgore wiped her eyes brusquely, unstrapped, sealed her helmet, and headed for the passenger compartment. She’d cycled through the lock by the time Debnam got back to Asteria, and the two of them worked with practiced efficiency as power came on the winch, reeling in the cable the sergeant had attached to the life pod.
Getting it properly mated to the docking collar wasn’t easy, but life pods had been built to standard models for over six hundred T-years for moments exactly like this. It took them less than ten minutes to establish a solid seal between the collars, and Kilgore made herself stand back and watch Debnam double check it—then check it again—lest they’d screwed up in their fatigue.
“Good seal,” he announced finally, and Kilgore removed her helmet as air rushed back into the lock. She hit the hatch toggle, but she wasn’t really s
urprised when nothing happened, given the pod’s obvious loss of power. She drew a deep breath and reached out to the manual locking lever on the pod hatch, vaguely surprised to realize her hand was trembling.
She had to pull twice before the lever activated.
No surprise there, she thought, looking at the pod’s scorched, scored, seared, and actually dented surface. My God, they must’ve been right on the fringe of the fireball when their ship went up!
Then the hatch opened, and she looked in at the unconscious passengers. Neither looked to be in very good shape, she thought, and activated the closer Manty’s external med panel readout. It was impossible to read the woman’s skinsuit nameplate. From her suit’s blackened appearance, she’d been way too close to something nasty even before she boarded the pod. But the med panel came up, and Kilgore inhaled deeply.
“Broken arm, half a dozen broken ribs, and some internal bleeding,” she told Debnam. “But the vitals look good.” Her smile faded and she looked over her shoulder at the sergeant. “According to the readout, the only reason she’s unconscious is that she tranked herself pretty much to the max from her skinny’s pharmacope about an hour ago. ’Nough to keep her out till her suit’s enviro ran out.” Her mouth twitched. “Guess she’d figured out how unlikely anybody was to find them.”
“Don’t blame her,” Debnam said softly. “Don’t think I’d want to be awake under those circumstances, either.” He shook his head. “Surprised she didn’t go ahead and OD, really.”
“Don’t think you can with a Manty skinsuit,” Kilgore replied absently, switching her attention to the other Manticoran. She keyed the second med panel, then inhaled again, much more sharply.
“Not good,” she said. “Looks like the spine’s gone in at least three places, and his vitals don’t look good at all. And—” she looked back at the woman “—according to the time chop, she tranked him five minutes before she tranked herself.” Her mouth tightened. “Probably wanted to make sure he was out before she put herself to sleep, too.”