Duty, Honor, Planet

perpetually disapproving gaze of Commander Hellene D’Annique, First Officer of the Patton. 

“Captain wants to see you on the bridge,” she told him curtly, “soonest.”

“Yes’m,” he croaked, but she was gone.

“What the fuck, over?” Jason heard Vinnie’s voice beside him and tried to sit up—and quickly discovered what the NCO was bitching about. His head felt like it weighed ten kilos. And it probably did.

“We’re still at three gee’s,” Vinnie said, steadying himself against the side of his chamber.

“Emergency deceleration,” McKay guessed, prying himself painfully out of his g-sleep chamber. “Something’s wrong.” From everywhere around him, he could hear the groans and complaints of the Marines and the scientific staff—apparently, the Fleet personnel had been revived earlier.

“Orders, sir?” Vinnie asked him.

McKay glanced around, saw that Jock and Tom’s eyes were on him as well.

“Collect Lieutenant Shamir and Gunny Lambert,” Jason instructed him, “and meet me in Situation Room Three in an hour.”

* * *

Jason watched the image of Antonov fade from the main bridge viewscreen, his heart pounding. He jerked his head toward Captain Arvid Patel, saw the man watching him with a somber expression.

“The ship’s computer picked it up out around the orbit of Saturn,” the spare, thin-faced Fleet officer told him, “and brought me out of g-sleep.” He grimaced. “We were still braking at five-gees, and believe me, it wasn’t half as pleasant as it is now.”

“Have you confirmed this?” McKay rasped, mouth dry, the heavy deceleration dragging at him.

“We received a tightbeam signal from the Bradley not a half-hour ago,” Patel said. “She’s hold up in the belt near Pallas, along with a few dozen system defense boats and corporate cargo haulers. She was steaming in from a run to Eridani when she received an emergency signal from Luna—it gave her enough warning to get away.” The ship’s captain fell back into his padded chair at the center of the bridge with a sigh, his dusky face darkening even more.

“The Fleet engineers at the Lunar mines saw the whole thing. Apparently, the enemy hijacked a robot freighter from the Ceres run and loaded it up with those drop pods—and quite a few fusion bombs. When the ship reached Cislunar orbit, the pods were ejected and the ship headed straight for the Defense Base at L-4.” Patel’s eyes closed for a moment, pain evident in the set of his mouth.

“L-4 saw what was happening and launched missiles, but it was too late. The ship went up and took the Defense Base with it.”

Jason remembered Colonel Mellanby and felt an intense sadness and something of disbelief that even a fusion bomb could take out the Snake. But most of his thoughts were absorbed with the fact that Shannon was either somewhere on Earth and in imminent danger, or on that station and dead.

No! he screamed at himself silently. She was alive. He wouldn’t let himself believe her dead—not this time.

“About an hour after the pods hit the atmosphere,” Patel went on, “the Lunar base saw seven ships coming in from somewhere in the direction of Ceres.”

The captain punched a command into his console and an image came on the viewscreen of a squadron of spacecraft in a loose wedge formation. Jason shook his head, wondering if his eyes were still bleary from the g- tanks—for the ships were the oddest collection of craft he’d seen outside the Air and Space Museum.

Three of them were Republic ships—corporate cargo haulers, most likely pirated and refitted with armor and weapons—but four were obviously Russian Protectorate ships from a hundred years ago. Bright flares of fusion fire expanded like balloons behind giant blast bells as a drive lasers reached out to ignite deuterium/tritium fuel pellets in a pulse drive that hadn’t been used in the Republic for twenty years. Paired habitat cylinders were hinged on each side of the main hull, fixed and motionless under acceleration but designed to rotate for gravity when the ship was in free fall. Jason could see that weapons pods had been grafted to the shielding over the bulbous fuel tanks, almost an afterthought on ships designed for asteroid mining.

The camera view panned in to the grey-metaled hull of the lead ship, lingering on the red and white vertical stripes of the Protectorate flag.

“The Lunar base stopped transmitting about a half-hour later.” Patel hit a control and the screen went dark. “We’re burning in to join the Bradley at Pallas—we should be there in six hours.” He turned to look Jason in the eye. “I want you to meet me in the shuttle bay at…” He glanced at his watch. “…2300 hours. We’ll be meeting with Captain Minishimi at the multicorps mining base—she’s set up a command center there. If you can come up with anything, I’m sure we’ll all be glad to hear it.”

“Aye, sir,” Jason replied numbly. I’d be glad to hear it myself.

“Captain Patel!” The sensor officer spun around at his station. “We’ve got a contact at four million kilometers, coming in way off the ecliptic.” He shook his head. “It just popped onto the screen, sir—one second it wasn’t there, then there was an energy burst almost like a nuclear explosion and there it was!”

“Calm down, Damphousse,” Patel soothed. “What can you tell me about it?”

“Uh…” The mousey little man glanced back at his board. “It’s small and slow, sir—can’t mass much more than five or six thousand tons, and the spectrograph says he’s running some kind of fission drive.” He looked back around. “It looks like he’s setting a course for Earth.”

“It’s one of them,” Jason decided. Patel fixed him with a questioning stare.

“Are you certain?”

“The Russians are using some kind of hole in space—that’s got to be what your sensor man saw,” McKay said. “No other way a ship that small would be out here. We should intercept it.”

“If he gets off a transmission, we could be sentencing a lot of innocent people to death,” Patel reminded him. “You heard what Antonov said.”

“His communication gear can’t be that good,” Jason pointed out. “If what we’ve seen so far is any indication, he’ll be using straight microwave. Jam him.”

Patel frowned, his eyes lowered in thought as he weighed the consequences.

“All right,” he finally assented. “Sound general quarters,” he ordered the First Officer abruptly. “Helm, take us on fastest possible intercept course—I want to be on top of him before he knows we’re there.” The whooping of the alarm filled the ship’s bridge and Patel had to raise his voice to be heard over it. “Communications, lay down a wide-spectrum microwave jam—I don’t want him getting a word out on radio. Weapons, arm lasers and let me know when we reach optimum range.”

“We’ve got to take them alive,” McKay said quickly, grabbing hold of the edge of Patel’s chair as the ship lurched to starboard, changing course to go after the bogey.

“We’ll try,” Patel told him, seemingly unaffected by the stomach-jarring turn. “But that all depends on how cooperative he wants to be.” He turned to Damphousse. “Give me a sensor-enhanced image on the main screen.”

  The viewer lit up with a glittering starfield, and it took Jason a moment to search through the points of multicolored light for the glowing red triangle that represented the enemy ship. It was moving slowly compared to the Patton’s velocity of nearly a tenth of lightspeed and, even as he watched, the icon was growing in relation to the decreasing distance between the ships.

“Laser range in ten minutes,” the Weapons officer announced.

“Helm, I want to match velocities with him,” Patel ordered.

“Sir,” the helmsman objected, looking up in surprise, “that will take a five-g deceleration analog for at least five minutes!”

“Then sound the alarm and start the burn, Mr. Raines,” Patel told him calmly. He caught Jason’s eye. “You might want to find an acceleration couch, McKay.”

Swallowing hard, Jason nodded and made his way over to one of the spare seats at the front of the bridge, strapping himself in just as the acceleration alarms began. Then a massive weight came down on his chest and it was all he could do to force breath into his lungs. Prying his eyes open, he let his head loll to the side and saw the bridge crew also struggling against the press of the focused tidal forces, pressed back into the liquid-filled cushions of their seats, only their hands and eyes moving. All of a sudden, the womblike sleep of the g-tanks didn’t seem so burdensome to him.