FWSS Ishaq, pinchspace
Under strict instructions from Commander Pasquale, Fellsworth had wasted no time getting the warfare training department back on its feet. The routine weekly team meeting had been in full swing for over an hour when it was interrupted by the main broadcast announcing five minutes to the drop for the transit through the Xiang Reef.
Fellsworth knew when to quit. From long experience, she knew she could never compete with a pinchspace drop, and so she was not about to try. “Okay, folks. Take a break. We’ll reconvene once the drop’s over.”
Michael stood up, stretching. It was strange to be back at work, to sit around a table for the weekly team meeting, with everyone acting as though nothing had happened. To make things even more uncomfortable, Fellsworth had reverted to her normal standoffish self. Any and every attempt by Michael to talk things over was rebuffed politely but firmly. It was as though Fellsworth had forgotten that they were still under open arrest and that the charges had not been withdrawn by Constanza even if she and the rest of the ship knew they would be. With a mental shrug of the shoulders, Michael went to the cooler to get some water. He was going to need it. God, he hated pinchspace drops.
“Sir?”
It was Bettany.
“What’s up, Morris?”
“There’s something to see you. Too big to be human, so it must be either a cyborg or a marine. Oh, and a small marine as well.”
Michael laughed as he went to the door. Had to be Yazdi and Murphy. Who else could it be?
It was. Christ, Murphy is huge, Michael thought. His neck ached trying to look the man in the face. “Corporal Yazdi, Marine Murphy. Come to arrest me?”
Yazdi’s face reddened. “Hell, no, sir,” she muttered. “Just wanted a word.”
“Okay. Can’t be too long. I’ve got a meeting after we drop. Got your bag? Don’t want you chucking all over the table.”
Yazdi waved a bag in silent reply. The two marines followed Michael through to one of the small meeting rooms. “Take a seat, guys.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“What can I do for you?”
“Well, sir.” Yazdi stopped; she looked faintly embarrassed. “Well,” she continued, “we wanted to say that we’re pleased it all worked out for you in the end. I know it’s not official yet, but it seems pretty clear what’s going to happen.”
“Thank you. You’re right. It has all worked out in the end. Oh, shit. Hold on, guys.” With that, Ishaq’s alarms sounded and the universe turned itself inside out as the ship dropped into normalspace.
After the drop, Michael and the marines cleaned themselves up quickly.
“Right, where were we? Oh, yes. I was-” Michael was stopped dead by the strident urgency of the ship’s klaxon driving the crew to general quarters.
“What the hell?” Michael shouted. Acting on instinct, he and the two marines erupted from their seats to join the crowd of spacers trying to get out of the department’s one and only door at the same time. With maddening slowness, the jam cleared.
When Michael got to the door, with Yazdi and Murphy close behind, the world erupted around him, a sudden tornado of smoke and flame ripping the ship apart around him before disappearing as fast as it had come. Oh, shit, Michael thought despairingly. Rail-gun slugs; it had to be. God above, he prayed, not again; please, God, not again. For a moment, he did not think he could take it, his hands turning cold and clammy when he remembered the last time. Desperate now, he knew that duty was his best defense against the bowel-churning panic threatening his tenuous grip on reality. Michael clawed his way to a survival station, with Yazdi and Murphy following. With frantic energy born of a desperate hope that somehow Ishaq and her crew were going to survive, Michael tore open the doors and began to hurl skinsuits into the mass of people behind him. Murphy’s huge mass forced some semblance of discipline on what was close to a panicstricken mob. When there were only three suits left, Michael threw two to Murphy and Yazdi before grabbing the last one for himself. In a matter of seconds, he was secure inside it, the plasglass helmet sealing onto the neck ring with a satisfying ssssssffffftt as the shapeskin molded itself to his body. He watched carefully as the suit ran its start-up diagnostics. Thank God, he thought. All green. He had a good suit.
Michael looked around, cold sweat beading on his face. He wondered what the hell he could do that would make the slightest difference in a situation that seemed to be going from bad to catastrophic faster than he could think and faster than Ishaq seemed able to react. Hesitating, he stood there, and then another rail-gun salvo hit home. This time there was serious damage. All of a sudden, the air around Michael was a tortured mass of smoke and flame. The shock wave from a close pass by a rail-gun slug punched him hard against the nearest bulkhead. We’re dead, he thought as he staggered back to his feet. Whoever was attacking was good enough-and close enough-to have the Ishaq on toast.
In seconds the smoke was so dense, Michael could not see an arm’s length in front of him. Underneath him, the deck bucked and heaved as more slugs smashed home. He cursed silently, pushing the fear and panic that threatened to overwhelm him back down where they had come from. Secondary explosions were beginning to rip Ishaq apart; massive shock waves were hammering through the ship, and the artgrav was losing the unequal struggle. Around him, skinsuited shapes came and went, looming out of the smoke before disappearing to God only knew where, the spacers staggering and slipping like drunks. Frantically, Michael patched his neuronics into the ship’s main AI only to find to his horror that it was dead. That meant one thing: Ishaq was in serious trouble. No matter which channel he tried to patch his neuronics into, there was nothing. The calm, rational voice of authority, of someone-anyone-who knew enough to take charge of the situation and mobilize the Ishaq’s crew was completely absent.
For a moment he was baffled. He stood, with an arm wrapped around a stanchion the only thing keeping him on his feet as Ishaq bucked and heaved like a mad thing under his feet. He did not understand it. How could a ship the size and power of the Ishaq become a useless wreck in the space of a few minutes? The massive shape of Murphy appeared out of the gloom with what looked like Yazdi close behind. Murphy’s massive hand came out of the murk, clamping his and Michael’s helmets together. “What do we do, sir? What do we do?” Murphy yelled hoarsely.
“I don’t know. I’m trying to find out what-”
The voice booming out of his skinsuit speakers came as a complete shock. “All stations, this is command. Abandon ship, I say again, abandon ship. All stations, this is command. Abandon ship, I say again, abandon ship. Sitrep on neuronics channel 45 Bravo. Sitrep on neuronics channel 45 Bravo. Go with God. Command out.”
“There’s your answer, Murphy. Go. Go now.” A frantic check with his neuronics showed him the way to the nearest lifepod station. “8-November’s our best bet, so let’s go.”
Michael and the two marines began to run, making their way to the nearest lifepod station. Michael patched his neuronics into channel 45 Bravo, apparently the only one of Ishaq’s hundreds of internal comm channels that was working. Whoever was responsible deserved a bloody medal, Michael thought as finally he got access to channel 45 Bravo. It was not what he expected. No situation reports there. The channel accessed the Ishaq’s event log, raw data from hundreds of ship systems, all chronicling Ishaq’s catastrophic fall from operational warship to dying hulk. He pounded along, the vast bulk of Murphy forcing a way past smashed bulkheads, wrecked equipment, and fallen cables; hydraulic pipes were spewing fluid onto decks already slippery with the blood of broken bodies awkwardly twisted across the passageway. He kept running with the event log scrolling in front of him, his neuronics skimming through each of Ishaq’s major systems in turn. He began to get some sense of the calamity that had befallen the Ishaq, and it was grim reading.
There was far too much unprocessed data for him to get any real understanding of it, and so it would have to wait. Comming an order to dump the entire event log into his neuronics for later, he turned his mind back to the more pressing matter of survival. From what he had seen so far, it was only a matter of time before Ishaq’s main fusion plants blew, and if they were not a long way clear when that happened, that would be it.
Murphy skidded to a halt. Turning with surprising speed for such a large man, he shot his arm out to grab Yazdi and Michael before hurling them unceremoniously into the access hatch of one of the few lifepods still left at station 8-November. Michael offered up a quick prayer of thanks. He had missed the hatch, and without Murphy he would have wasted precious seconds finding it.
“Stay there!” Murphy barked. “I’ll make a final check, and then we’ll go. If I’m not back in one minute, go without me. I’ll get the next bus.” He disappeared back into the filthy gray-black murk that choked Ishaq’s passageways from deck to deckhead.
Michael did as he was told, clawing his way across the sill and as far into the pod as he could get. Huddled at the far end were three spacers, two women and a man, all still alive from what he could see, but barely. The man looked to have been caught without a skinsuit too close to an explosion. His face and upper body were a mass of reddish-brown blisters streaked with black charring, and his mouth a hideous grinning parody of a smile with white teeth against blackened lips; his one-piece shipsuit was a tattered wreck, ripped and torn almost to his waist. The other two were unconscious. Michael could get only a quick look at them before Murphy returned. He hurled two more spacers bodily into the pod, then climbed in, dragging two more after him. Michael watched openmouthed as Murphy reached back out of the air lock to grab another two. The pod was now full, and without hesitating, Murphy flipped the black-and-orange safety cover on the launch panel, put the selector to automatic, and mashed the red jettison switch with a fist the size of a large ham before collapsing onto the deck, chest heaving.
A second later, the lifepod’s solid fuel motors ignited with a thudding jolt. The pod’s artgrav trembled as it struggled to compensate for the massive acceleration pushing it clear of the doomed ship. Even as the lifepod’s artgrav stabilized, a second giant blow smashed into it, picking it up and hurling it into space.
It was a blast wave.
Ishaq was gone.
Michael and the two marines, the only occupants of the lifepod who were not injured, had managed to restore a semblance of order.
The three worst casualties-two weapons techs and an ordnance petty officer-were beyond help. It had been the work of moments to strip them before bundling them into one of the emergency regen bags secured to the lifepod’s bulkheads. There was nothing more Michael or anyone could do for them. They would live long enough to be rescued or they wouldn’t. It was as simple as that.
The rest of the lifepod’s complement was a pretty sorry-looking bunch, but they would survive. The onboard bulkhead-mounted medibots were working like demented little demons, debriding, cutting, suturing, injecting, hydrating, and dosing. Michael’s only contribution to the process was to lift and shift spacers around so that the bots could get in to finish the job. Finally, it was his turn, and it surprised him when the medibots told him in no uncertain terms to strip his skinsuit off so that they could clean and stitch a cut on his back he had thought was just a bruise.
He patched his neuronics into the medibot’s holocam to see what was going on and winced when he saw the jagged, shallow gash across his back running down from his shoulder. “I didn’t even feel that,” he murmured. He should pay more attention to his suit integrity alarms, he thought. Canceling them without checking for damage was probably not a life-extending strategy.
Corporal Yazdi looked impressed. “Nice one, sir. You know what?”
Michael rolled his eyes. “What?”
“Should have been a marine.” Yazdi grinned. “Not a scratch on either one of us.”
“Hmmph!” Michael winced as a suture went in too deep. “That hurts. Tell you what, Corporal Yazdi. Stand behind Marine Murphy; that’s the moral of the story. He’d stop a tacnuke at forty paces.”
Yazdi smiled. “He bloody well would. You ready for an update, sir?”
Bugger, Michael thought. He had forgotten: Once an officer, always responsible, or so the saying went. The time had come to display the leadership qualities three expensive years at Space Fleet College had ground into him, even though all he really wanted to do was to curl up in a corner and go to sleep.
His hyperexcited, adrenaline-fueled high was beginning to drop away. The full impact of what had happened had sunk in, dragging his spirits down as it did. He could not see how more than a handful of Ishaq’s crew could have gotten away, and that meant a lot of people he knew might be gone. Stone, Fellsworth, Ichiro, Bettany. “Christ,” he muttered aloud. That was for starters. How many more would there be? The list would be meters long.
“Sir?” Yazdi prompted gently.
Michael started as he came to earth. “Shit. Sorry. Daydreaming again. Fire away, Corporal.”
“We’re in trouble, sir.”
“Trouble? Of course we’re in trouble.” Michael looked baffled. Talk about stating the blindingly obvious.
Yazdi shook her head. “I don’t mean it like that, sir,” she replied patiently. “Have a look at the holovid. I’ve slaved it to the external holocam.”
Michael did as he was told. He stared at the holovid, but it did not make any sense. “Who is that?” All he could see was a single merchant ship closing in on them. He looked closer. “Who is he?”
Yazdi shrugged. “Don’t know, sir. It looks like he doesn’t want us around. Here, sir.”
“Stand by one.” Overriding the lifepod’s automatic pilot, Michael frantically spun the pod to point its armored nose at the unknown attacker. It was not much, but every little bit helped. “Right, Corp. Sorry. Go on.”
“No worries. Here, sir. Have a look.” Michael looked on intently as Yazdi zoomed the holocam in as close as it would go. For a moment, what he was seeing did not make sense. The ship was using chromaflage to conceal something, but what? An icy hand clamped itself around his heart as it came to him.
“Oh, Jeez! Are those what I think they are?”
“They are, sir. Those are rail-gun ports. That’s what took the Ishaq out. That’s-”The holovid flared with the brilliant flash of a rail-gun broadside. An instant later, the lifepod was slapped backward, the hull screeching in protest, a massive crunch announcing a rail-gun slug strike. It was over in an instant, so quickly that Michael did not have time to feel any fear. Desperately, he checked for damage.
“Lucky, lucky, lucky,” he muttered as he ran the pod’s diagnostics. The slug had punched into the lifepod’s bow and ripped its way along the outer skin without penetrating the inner hull, leaving only a blazing white-hot furrow spewing ionized gas to record its passing. They had survived by pure, blind chance; a hit dead center would have gutted the pod. He took a deep breath. A lifepod was a small target, but even small targets got hit. His stomach knotted at the thought.
“Christ! Now it all makes sense. Those are the bad guys, Corporal.”
“They sure as hell are, sir.”
“Hang on a moment. Let me have a look at something.” Michael patched his neuronics into the Ishaq’s event log he had downloaded in the awful near-panicked rush to get to the lifepods before the ship blew. The data were raw and there were terabytes to look at, so it took a while, but he found it in the end: data from Ishaq’s infrared sensors acquired in the moments before the rail-gun attack had hit home. There it was. Michael could not be sure, but it looked to him like the characteristic heat signature of a ship that had lost fusion containment and exploded. He looked again. Not one ship, either-lots of ships. Ishaq had not died alone. Other ships had died that day. Why? None of it made any sense.
“Shit. This changes things bigtime.” Michael sat back to think. “Right, this is what we need to do, Corporal. First, I’m going to comm you and Murphy here a data file-a big data file. It’s the Ishaq’s event log, and if we live long enough, we’ll need it to convict these people of piracy. I’m going to put a neuronics block on it, so whoever these people are, you can’t tell them it exists. Okay?”
The two marines nodded. “Good.” There was a short pause as the transfer went through. “Right! Now we need to get our escape kits tucked away and then our skinsuits back on in case they get lucky and punch a hole in us. Anything else?”
Yazdi shook her head. “No, sir. Got to say, I don’t fancy our chances. They’re either going to blow us to hell or it’s some damn prison camp somewhere.”
Michael nodded. Yazdi was right. If they were going to be blown to hell, there was nothing he could do to stop it. And if they were about to be captured, they would need the little escape kits tucked away safely under synthskin patches: two under the upper arms, one low on each buttock, and one behind each thigh above the knee. Neuronics blocks made it impossible for any Fleet spacer to reveal the kits’ existence to anyone not positively authenticated as serving Fleet personnel, so their captors would never find out. Whoever they were.
“Right,” he said forcefully as a quick check of the holovid showed their attacker closing in. “Let’s get the escape kits out and make a start. We may not have much time.” He stood up to reach a small panel high on one bulkhead, pressing his finger down on the access control. A small prick signaled that his DNA had been sampled, and then the panel clicked open, revealing a tightly packed mass of small white packets.
They were in business.
Commodore Monroe looked at his chief of staff in frustration. “What do you mean we can’t eliminate them? They’re only damn lifepods, for Kraa’s sake. Rail guns, lasers, machetes, baseball bats, sticks. I don’t give a damn what you use. Get rid of them. No survivors, remember?”
“I do, sir, but these are military lifepods with hardened, self-sealing hulls. They are damn tough. We’re only fitted with standard mership lasers. They are taking far too long to break into them, and even then we’re only depressurizing them for a second or two. They’ll go to skinsuits and wait until the hull reseals. We could be all day.”
“Rail guns, then.”
“Sir,” Monroe’s chief of staff replied, a touch impatiently. “They’re too small. We can’t get them all. We’ve had two hits, neither fatal. It’ll take too long. Sir, I strongly advise that we move in and scoop them up. We can work out what to do with them later.”
Monroe thought about it for a moment. His chief of staff was right. He knew now that he had made a mistake. He had sent the rest of his ships on their way without thinking the problem through. According to the traffic schedule, the next merchant ship was due to arrive in less than half an hour. The window of opportunity he had taken to destroy twenty-seven FedWorld merchant ships and one heavy cruiser was closing fast. He was confident that his false identity would hold up to scrutiny, but not if he was sitting in the middle of an expanding cloud of ionized gas, firing lasers and rail guns at defenseless lifepods. Then there was the FedWorld heavy cruiser Al-Masu’di due in fifty minutes to worry about. He was damn sure they would not let him go without asking the hard questions.
“Right, I agree. Let’s do it.” He watched as his chief of staff gave the orders to move Quebec-One in close. Its two shuttles would launch as it approached to round up the strays.
“Okay, sir. That’s done.”
“Good. How long?”
“Twenty minutes, sir. Unlike ours, their pods are programmed to close in on each other to make recovery easier.”
Monroe grimaced. It would be close. “How kind of them. Such caring people, the Feds.” He sniffed. “How many pods?”
“Twenty-five, sir.”
Monroe’s eyebrows shot up. “Twenty-five? That all?”
“Twenty-five, sir. That’s it.”
Monroe blinked, still struggling to understand the full magnitude of the loss. “Kraa! So few.”
“We didn’t give them much time, sir. We caught them napping. When the fusion plant powering the aft rail-gun batteries lost containment. . Well, that was pretty much it for most of them. The rest would have gone when the main engines went up.”
“So how many spacers are we talking about?”
“FedWorld heavy cruisers carry twelve-man lifepods, sir. So at most, let’s see. . Three hundred? Probably less allowing for casualties.”
Monroe turned away. For a brief instant he felt sick, his adrenaline-fueled compulsion to eliminate the pods gone.
He might be a Hammer. He might hate the Feds-and he did-but he was a spacer, too, a human speck alone in the appalling vastness of space. Three hundred survivors from a crew of-what? — well over a thousand spacers. That was hard.
Monroe turned back to his chief of staff. “One more thing.”
“Sir?”
“They will have seen Quebec-One. Nothing we can do about that, but they must not know who we are. I want standard mership skinsuits worn, visors down. Nothing obviously Hammer, nothing military-issue, and stun-gun anyone who’s not already unconscious. Once we’ve got them locked down on board, we’ll work out what to do next.”
“Understood, sir!”
Monroe watched as the man fired off the necessary orders. He did not have to ask his chief of staff what he wanted to do with their three hundred or so unwanted guests. It was bloody obvious. He could see it in the man’s eyes. But somehow he could not see himself ejecting defenseless spacers into the void. Killing at a distance was one thing. Killing people you had just rescued, well, that was quite another-he smiled grimly-even for a Hammer who had commanded an operation that had killed twenty-eight ships and close to two thousand spacers.
Monroe sat back; he was well satisfied with the day’s work. The Feds would be shitting themselves when the news broke, he thought. The loss of twenty-seven merships would be bad enough; the impact on their interstellar trade would be nothing short of a disaster. But the loss of the Ishaq would be ten times worse. For the Feds, it would be an absolute catastrophe. Monroe had been to staff college. He knew how the Feds saw themselves. The power of their Space Fleet was the foundation on which the safety and security of the entire Federated Worlds was built.
He smiled again. For once, things were going the Hammer’s way. It was a good feeling.