Duty, Honor, Planet

drum-fed mini-grenade launcher on his hip and anchoring himself to the floor with the electromagnet in the heel of his right boot.

Jason and Tom had barely had time to move behind the two when Jock fired. The missile kicked out of the tube on a gust of compressed coldgas before the rocket motor ignited, slamming the warhead into the blast door with a blast that would have thrown the four of them backwards had they not countered it with their attitude jets. A wreath of smoke shrouded the far end of the corridor, but Vinnie didn’t wait for it to clear—he immediately pumped a half-dozen 25mm grenades into the bridge, aiming high, hoping ricochets off the ceiling would help spread the fragments.

Things sounded funny on a spaceship, Jason thought out of nowhere—the thinner atmosphere and the different mixture of oxygen and helium made the bang of the grenades sound tinny, like a snare drum, and his helmet filters baffled the sound even more. Jason felt Crossman start to move into the bridge but grabbed his shoulder to stop him—in the zero-g, the fragments from the grenades would ricochet around the room for several seconds unless something soft stopped them.

Jason mentally counted to three, then let loose of Crossman and grasped the control for his maneuver pack, giving it a hard squeeze. The jet of compressed gas kicked him in the pants and sent him flying headlong into the bridge, with Crossman close behind. Jason cut the boost and flipped end for end just as he entered the ruined doorway, coming into the bridge feet first and giving himself a microsecond’s sideways burst that put him in a slow spin.

The bridge slowly spun around him as he covered all directions with the assault rifle cradled across his chest, finger half-pressure on the trigger… and saw nothing. The bridge was deserted.

Outdated flatscreen displays flickered with activity, and here and there an indicator light flickered red or green in eerie silence. Other consoles, shattered either by the missile or the grenades, sparked wildly in a cloud of shattered glass and plastic. A haze of pale smoke floated through the room, playing tricks with Jason’s eyes, but his helmet’s infrared filters assured him that there was not a soul in the room but he and Crossman.

“Damn it,” Jason hissed as his boots came up against the huge flatscreen viewer at the far side of the bridge. “What is going on here?”

Crossman braked himself, a twisted grin on his face revealing both his confusion and his perverse pleasure in it. Back at the door, Vinnie and Jock slowly and cautiously made their way inside, Jock’s eyes flickering back and forth from the bridge to the corridor behind them.

“Vinnie,” Jason ordered, “check the ship’s computer—see if they’ve sabotaged the reactor or something.”

Not that doing that would make a lick of sense, he reflected. If the Defender went, the rest of the ships wouldn’t be able to fend off any kind of attack, either from the ground-based defenses or from the Republic ships already headed in from the asteroid belt. That was, after all, the reason they were attacking it.

So where was everyone?

Feeling the hairs standing up on the back of his neck, Jason carefully scanned every square centimeter of the walls with his helmet’s sensors. There was only one other way in or out of the bridge that he could see, and that was the rounded airlock to an emergency escape pod, but the lock yawned open and there was nothing inside. He could smell the rat, but the trick was seeing it.

“I can’t figure out this system,” Vinnie reported from one of the intact consoles. “Damned Cyrillic alphabet.”

“Sir,” Jock warned, still framed in the doorway, “something is not right here.”

“Yeah,” Jason breathed. “Vinnie, get that AI module in place and we’ll get out of here.”

“Aye, sir,” Mahoney muttered, one hand fishing on his belt for the computer module that the techs on Pallas had fashioned for them.

They’d dug deep into technical archives to emulate the old Russian computer operating systems and come up with an AI module that could penetrate them and permanently disable the Defender’s weapons control systems. Once the module launched the virus, the ship would be helpless when the Patton and the Bradley got here. Of course, it would behoove them not to be there when the cruisers arrived, since the plan was for this ship to be blown to vapors.

Vinnie had the module out and was checking the ports when Jason noticed the odd change in the bridge lights. The flashing red of the emergency strobe built into the hull above them, protected by a hard, clear plastic casing that Vinnie’s grenades hadn’t been able to penetrate, had changed its pulse rate, and was blinking frenetically. White strobes at the corners of the bridge joined its flashing beat, growing brighter with every eyeblink, becoming almost painful in their intensity, yet somehow Jason couldn’t seem to look away.

It was a gradual thing, so that when the moment came that Jason realized he couldn’t move, his mind was too numb to be surprised by it. It was like being caught in a cobweb—you knew that the slightest movement could set you free. But he couldn’t move, not a centimeter, and somehow he knew that Vinnie, Jock and Tom had to be the same way, even though he couldn’t see them, couldn’t see anything but the light.

It seemed that only a moment had passed, but the next thing Jason knew, he was floating limply on his back, his helmet off, staring into the face of a legend.

“So,” Antonov rumbled in unaccented English, “this is the best they could do.”

Sorry to disappoint you, Jason wanted to say, but he wasn’t sure if he could yet control his voluntary muscles well enough to speak. Smarting off didn’t seem that great an idea anyway, with half- a-dozen automatic weapons visibly pointed his way.

He managed to move his head a few centimeters to one side and saw that Vinnie, Jock and Tom were likewise immobilized and disarmed, in the grasp of a mixed force of Protectorate officers and biomechs. Their zero-g maneuver packs had been removed, leaving them helpless even to escape, much less to fight. The Protectorates must, he realized abruptly, have been hiding in some concealed compartment, waiting for the right moment to spring the trap.

McKay looked back to Antonov, thinking that the man looked just as big in person as he did in the history videos. His barrel chest threatened to burst the seams of the dark-toned, soft-armored vacuum suit that seemed to be the standard uniform for Protectorate officers on the ship, and his bull neck barely fit through the helmet yoke— unlike the rest of the Protectorate officers, he wasn’t wearing his helmet.

“In case you are curious as to what has happened to you,” the General told them, obviously pleased with himself, “the lights you saw are part of the ship’s internal security system—a result of an interesting experimental project underway shortly before my little altercation with the Chinese. They flash on a frequency designed to cause seizures and paralysis, and I just knew they would come in handy someday.

“You Americans are all alike,” Antonov went on, shaking his head. “So overconfident, so arrogant to think we would not have precautions against such contingencies.”

“Ain’t… fuckin… ’merican,” Jock managed to mutter through clenched teeth.

“Do not fool yourself, my friend,” Antonov laughed. “You may have the illusion of freedom, but you are all pawns of the Americans—or you were,” he smiled with self-satisfaction, “till my return. Your sons and daughters will thank me someday.” Antonov turned to Lieutenant Dubronov. “Where are the others?”

“One group is in the auxiliary weapons control center,” the younger man reported, checking the video readouts from the ship’s security cameras from a clipboard-sized computer readout. He spoke in Russian, but Jason had undergone a hypno-imprint of the language back at Aphrodite when it had become apparent who their enemy truly was. “We have troops in place to keep them pinned there, per your orders. The other…” He trailed off, face drawing into a deep frown as he worked the controls on the readout.

“Well,” Antonov demanded, “where are they?”

Dubronov’s went pale beneath his faceplate.

“Sir, they do not appear on any of the security scanners.” He looked up from the readout. “It does not seem that they are anywhere on the ship.”

“Then I would strongly suggest you check again, Lieutenant,” Antonov intoned darkly, face clouding over. Jason could see his knuckles whitening on the heavy machine pistol in his right hand and wondered for a moment if he might shoot the man. The humans among their captors let their eyes flicker toward the General, wary at the possibility that the man might explode.