An Uneasy Alliance: Book 4 of the Sentenced to War Series

by Chaney, J. N.

  He knew he should wait for the other three troopers to join him, but his blood was coursing through him. As much as they were supposed to train as if they were in a real environment, the fact that it was a sim, one of many they were going to conduct today, opened the door to taking more chances.

  “Lines, sweep left short of the ridge. Akkeke and Gingham, go over the top and sweep left,” he passed.

  There was movement to his front, and fire reached out to him, but only a few rounds before Rev cut down the threat. He vaulted the crew-served automatic, with two dead bodies around it, when the crack of a branch cut through the din.

  Rev whirled at the sound . . . and the sim closed down. Heart still pounding, he looked about in confusion for a moment as the lights came on.

  “Why’d they cut us? We were just about to break the ambush,” Rev asked the squad leader, who was standing on the platform next to him. Rev’s blood was still pounding though his body. Even with this being just a sim, he felt a void, of something being snatched from him. He wanted to crush the electronic enemies. He wanted to prove that an IBHU Marine had no peer on the field of battle.

  “Don’t know. Just stand by, and we’ll find out.”

  “Did their sims crash?” he asked as he started to come off his warrior high. Rev was a big fan of the Mezame sims, but knowing that the system wasn’t perfect wouldn’t bother him in the least. Childish, but there it was.

  “All troopers, return to your quarters immediately and await further orders,” came over the intercom.

  “You heard him,” Gamay said. “Keep your weapons with you and just hang until we find out what’s going on.”

  “What do you think?” Ting-a-ling asked Rev as they got off their platforms. “Are we getting any action?”

  “Two days out? Probably just a drill.”

  “It better be. If we miss the Landing Day celebrations on Barclay, that’s going to suck big-time.”

  “We’re missing Barclay?” Lines stuck his head over and asked after overhearing that last statement.

  “No, I was just saying that if we do get diverted and miss it, that will suck,” Ting-a-ling replied.

  “So, we’re still going?”

  “We don’t know, Lines. If this is a drill, then yes. We’re still going. If it’s something else, then who knows?” Rev said.

  He could understand the sergeant’s concern, though. The Landing Day celebration, where the company would be showing the CoH flag, was probably going to be the highlight of their deployment. From the briefs they had—and from Sergeant Crocker’s first-hand experience—it could be the highlight of each of their three-year tours, much less this one deployment.

  “So, let’s just hold off getting all excited and wait until we find out what’s happening.”

  The sergeant nodded, but he didn’t look too confident.

  Ting-a-ling slung his weapon and said, “Let’s go, then.”

  “Hold on a sec.” Rev hurried over to the squad leader. “What about me? Do I have to keep my IBHU on?”

  She thought about it for a moment, then said, “No, you go back and take it off, then head back to berthing.”

  “Roger that.”

  He told Ting-a-ling that he’d meet him back in the stateroom and hurried down to Filmore. The young man seemed nervous, jumping as Rev entered the space.

  “What’s going on, sir?”

  “What’s going on is that we’re supposed to go to our quarters and wait for the word.”

  “Are we being attacked?”

  “Easy there, Filmore. Who would be attacking us?”

  “The Centaurs?”

  “Who have sued for peace. And have they broken that in the six months since then?”

  “Uh . . . no, sir.”

  “Just calm down. It could just be a drill. So, help me get Pashu off, and you can go back to your quarters.”

  The guy was jumpy as a flightless bird in a cat hotel, but he quickly rolled up the hoist and disconnected the IBHU. Within a minute, she was back in her slot, ready for the next training mission.

  Rev connected his social arm. “You get back now. Someone will get the word to us soon enough.”

  The guy didn’t look convinced, but he nodded and headed off to the Civvie-Country. Rev shook his head as he watched the man hurry away. With his temperament, he may not have been the best choice to be on a military combat vessel.

  Rev shut the hatch and made his way to berthing. Very few of the others were actually in the staterooms. Most were in the passage, chatting with each other. Rev took a spot next to Ting-a-ling.

  “Any word yet?”

  “Nada.”

  “It’s just a drill,” Rice said. “They always have these early on.”

  “Yeah, but every other navy announces shipboard drills. Not keeping us standing around with our thumbs up our asses wondering what’s going on,” Kvat said. “Fucking Mezzies. Always so by-the-book that it gets in the way of things.

  “No slight intended, Toshi,” he added to Toshi Gant, a Mezame soldier in Third Squad.

  “Slight taken, asshole.”

  Kvat rolled his eyes. “Whatever.”

  Rev thought there was some truth to what Kvat said. For all the quality on the ship, the Mezame Navy, at least, could be a little bit too structured for their own good. And if Rev, as a Union Marine, thought that, then there was probably something to it.

  Before anyone else could jump in, the intercom system came to life, shutting everyone up. “All hands, all hands. The MCS Takagahara is diverting from our previous orders. A civilian vessel, the Nightingale’s Song, has issued a distress call. They may be under attack by raiders. The Council has ordered us to proceed to the location and assess the situation.

  “All non-essential personnel and Bravo Crew are to remain in your quarters until further notice. All Alpha Crew should be at your Priority 2 stations.”

  The intercom cut out.

  “Still think it’s a drill?” Gant asked Kvat.

  “Yeah, I do.”

  The intercom came back to life. “Fox Company officers, please report to the commander of troops’ stateroom.”

  All eyes swing to the karnan.

  He shrugged and said, “OK, maybe this is the real deal.”

  19

  “Godspeed, Fox Company,” the launch officer passed.

  The sleigh lurched as the mule towed it to the launcher. In a moment, as the tug’s tractor locked on, they’d be out in the black, closing in on the Nightingale’s Song from a kiloklick away.

  “Emissions silence from here until boarding,” the platoon commander passed over the net.

  Until they reached the target, the sleigh should pass as a small, lifeless hunk of space debris. A high-tech ship of war might be able to pierce the shielding and detect the platoon of troopers inside, but the Nightingale’s Song was a commercial liner, plying the space lanes, taking people to and fro in semi-luxurious comfort.

  Only now, her journey had been interrupted. The ship had popped out of bubble space near the borders of the Gray Reaches, far beyond the normal traffic lanes and any populated system. The Gray Reaches was the vast area of unincorporated space, between the Perseus and Sagittarius Arms. It wasn’t exactly lawless, but it would be fair to say central control of the area was not solid, particularly when resources were focused on fighting the Centaurs.

  As a result, criminal activities were frequent there and other areas of the Gray Reaches, including piracy during the course of the war. Ransoms were demanded for the return of the passengers and crew, the cargo, or even for the ships themselves. After the owners of the James Farber refused early on in the war, the ship, with all hands aboard, was sent to the shipping line’s home system where it was destroyed in spectacular fashion above the planet.

  The message was taken.

  Throughout the war, pirates took ships. Some were caught. The Union Navy, for example, had held back ships and Marines to keep Union space safe, but the rewards were too great to
ignore, and ships plied space where protection wasn’t as robust. The risk was deemed worth it.

  No other ships were destroyed like the James Farber. But other companies or planets either couldn’t or wouldn’t pay the ransoms. Those ships, passengers, and crews disappeared, the ships to be stripped or disguised, and the people sold into a life of slavery.

  It was difficult for most citizens to accept that in this day and age, slavery still existed. Some people—people in power—denied it, saying it didn’t make economic sense. But the people were going somewhere.

  And with the war with the Centaurs over, the Congress of Humanity had refocused its energy to restoring commerce, and a huge part of that was to stamp out this particular evil.

  Whoever had taken the Nightingale’s Song probably thought they had more time before the authorities could take action. A year ago, they would have been right. But whatever measures the CoH had implemented almost immediately had detected the ship’s emergence from bubble space. Within five minutes, the Takagahara had been given the order to stand by. Thirty-six minutes after that, the mission came down. They were to rescue the Nightingale’s Song and arrest any surviving pirates.

  * * *

  “Show me that organizational chart again,” Rev ordered as the sleigh carried them through open space.

  Punch popped it up. The Home Guard’s methodology of task-organizing every mission was still new to Rev. In the Raiders, everything was pretty cut and dried. There were elements, teams, and platoons. If they needed a different capability outside of the unit, someone with that capability was attached. But the building blocks never changed.

  In the Home Guard, there were no such strictures below the squad level—and even those weren’t set in stone. Two squads, for example, could be combined for a super-squad, but not as a full platoon. Within the squad, there were no set fire teams. The squad could conduct operations as one semi-amorphous force or it could be broken down into individual troopers acting as self-contained units (and everything in between).

  It made sense from a tactical standpoint in that it gave the commander ultimate flexibility, but whereas almost every military known to humanity was used to a more structured organization, it was more difficult to implement and could lend itself to confusion.

  As much as Rev loved the Union Marines, he didn’t think this would work for normal infantry units without lots of time to prepare for a mission. But this wasn’t the Marines. This was the Home Guard, supposedly made up of the finest soldiers in human space. If anyone could handle the shifting structures, it should be them.

  But that didn’t mean Rev was confident. They’d had a relatively few short hours to put together and promulgate a plan. And now it was go-time. They’d emerged from bubble space well short of the Nightingale’s Song, where the distance and the Takagahara’s shielding should have rendered them invisible to the pirates, who would be using the commercial liner’s instruments, not military scanners.

  Now, it was time to ride the sleighs in, hopefully undetected, to conduct the breach and get troopers inside the ship. While not the most dangerous part of the mission, it was usually considered the most difficult.

  There were two modes of breaching: a deliberate breach, as when a ship had been disabled, and a hasty breach. The deliberate breach was conducted much as with MOUT operations, with each compartment cleared before the next. A hasty breach was a matter of rushing, overwhelming any resistance by numbers and force of will. Pirates had a habit of killing hostages when confronted, so this was going to be a hasty breach.

  Rev studied the organizational chart one more time. At the moment, the three sleighs, each with a platoon embarked, were approaching the target ship. If all things worked as planned, the sleighs would power up and brake, each approaching a different part of the ship. Each platoon would conduct a breach and move to its assigned objective.

  First Platoon would secure the engineering spaces. Second had the bridge. And Third would attempt to locate the bulk of the passengers and protect them.

  But before they could get to their objective, they had to get into the ship, which was Phase 1. For that phase, Rev was leading the breach team of Corporal Akkeke, PFC Gingham, and Corporal Acevedo. SFC Gamay would lead the entry team with the rest of the squad to get inside the ship and secure the breach site. Second and Third Squads would pass through and start to their respective objectives.

  The trip from the Takagahara to the Nightingale’s Song should take only forty-eight minutes, and that time was too precious to waste. Rev kept studying the organizational charts as well as the ship’s diagram. They hadn’t had much time to prepare, but he still wanted to make sure he was as ready as possible for any contingency.

  A single green LED flashed. The Navy coxswain turned around from her seat in the front of the sleigh and gave them all a thumbs-up.

  Rev sat up straighter. He’d been so wrapped up studying that he hadn’t realized the transit was almost over. They’d be braking in thirty seconds.

  “Status?”

 

  Rev extended Pashu and glanced at his fan, the new shipboard cannon. This was the first time he’d be going into combat with it instead of his braided meson cannon.

  It’ll do just fine. Don’t worry about it.

  He then patted the tiny Home Guard-issue Tata-74 in the holster on his thigh. The Tata-5 he’d been issued was almost a copy of the MF-30 sidearm he had in the Marines, but with a ship operation, that had been taken away and the 74 handed out instead. Firing two mm darts with expanding fins at close to hypervelocity speeds, it was deadly enough without being a threat to the ship being rescued. Unlike his MF-30, however, Punch had no connectivity with the Tata, so Rev couldn’t ask him to confirm its status.

  The LED on the bulkhead started flashing at once every two seconds. They had fifteen left. Rev locked onto his seat with Pashu’s extendable fingers. His EVA started pressuring up along his arms, legs, and abdomen, shunting blood to his core and brain.

  For the last five seconds, the LED filled the sleigh with flashes. And then the sleigh powered up. The G’s were brutal as the sleigh braked, and Rev’s peripheral vision grayed out. He grunted as his body was forced into his seat. Comms silence was gone. If the pirates hadn’t seen them before, they sure would have now. Someone, maybe the lieutenant, grunted something over the net, but he was too worried about staying conscious to concern himself with what was being said.

  The coxswain had oriented the sleigh so that the deceleration forced the troopers into their seats. But now, as the sleigh slowed down, they were back into weightlessness. The shift was almost too much for Rev’s stomach, and a little vomit escaped up his throat, but he manned up and swallowed it back down.

  The roof of the sleigh retracted, bringing the body of the ship into view. The Nightingale’s Song wasn’t huge as liners go, but it was plenty big enough.

  With the sleigh matching the Nightingale’s Song, the coxswain took over, “diving” below the x-axis to come up on the other side of the ship. They passed under it, “under” only because their orientation made the troopers crane their heads up to see the ship as they went past. “Under” and “over” had little real meaning in space, so the terms were used within a personal perspective connotation.

  Rev pulled up an outline of the ship, which Punch matched to the real thing. As the sleigh passed under the ship, a red spot on his overlay started flashing. It represented their breach spot.

  “Get ready,” he passed to his small breach team.

  As with their training on Enceladus, this wasn’t a matter of simply blowing a hole in the ship. Hundreds of captive citizens were inside, and if the ship lost atmosphere, they would die. For this operation, they would be breaching the ship while maintaining the atmosphere inside.

  The breaching tube was essentially the same one that they’d use whether there would be atmosphere inside the ship or not. Once emplaced and latched on, five tri-carbon b
lades would emerge and cut through the hull. To make the breaching tube an airlock, an electrostatic curtain, the same kind that ships used in their hangers, would power up. Troopers would be able to enter the ship, but air would not be able to escape. The tube could maintain the lock for up to three hours. It would be up to an engineering team from the Takagahara to emplace a temporary airlock or seal up the breach before the breaching tube failed.

  “Ten seconds,” the lieutenant passed as the sleigh brought them around.

  “You’ve got the spot, right?” Rev asked Akkeke.

  “I’ve got it, Staff Sergeant.”

  Rev wasn’t the most experienced trooper in Null-G. He thought he was leading the breaching team because of what happened back on Enceladus. But Corporal Akkeke was skilled in weightless maneuvering, so Rev had given him the lead. He’d be guiding the tube to the spot with the other three assisting. The entire platoon’s entry was on the corporal’s shoulders.

  “Releasing in five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one!” the coxswain passed, and suddenly, the harness holding Rev in place retracted.

  “Go, go, go!” the lieutenant shouted over the net.

  The team was already moving, taking their handholds.

  “On me. Impulse level three. Hit it . . . now!” Akkeke said.

  The four lifted up and out of the sleigh, and if not quite in perfect unison, it was close enough for government work. Rev craned his head at the big bulk hanging over him.

  “Keep it slow,” Rev reminded the team.

  The tube had no weight, but it still had mass, and Rev couldn’t help but remember the last time he’d seen a tube in action. Time was of the essence. The pirates had to know they were there by now, but if the four of them crashed into the ship with enough force, the tube could be put out of action before anyone from the platoon could get inside.

  “I’ve got it,” Akkeke said with a little bit of peeve in his voice.

  Back off, Reverent. He knows how to do it.