Honor Bound

* * *

“Two minutes,” Esmeralda Villanueva announced from the cockpit, not glancing back, her eyes glued to her sensors. The lander was supposed to be nearly undetectable by radar or lidar, but the exhaust would still show up on thermal, and none of them wanted to think about what a kinetic kill weapon from one of the defense satellites would do to the aircraft.

“Get into jump positions,” Vinnie ordered, raising from his seat and signaling for everyone to move to the rear ramp.

McKay hit the quick release on his safety harness and waddled to the rear of the aircraft, burdened by nearly 80 kilos of armor, weapons and HALO gear, joining a double line of two dozen men and women hand-picked from the surviving Marine and Special Ops troops on the Sheridan for this mission. Jock was at the front of the right hand line, Sgt. Watanabe on the front of the one on the left.

McKay moved to the rear of the left hand line, glancing around expecting to see Vinnie at the same position on the right… but Vinnie had moved up to the cockpit. McKay saw him thump Cal Orton, the co-pilot, on the shoulder, then lean over to touch helmets with Esme, sharing a private word that no one else could overhear. The sight made McKay feel disconnected, somehow, and apart from the others; he felt a surge of nostalgia for the days when he’d first been a First Lieutenant and all his problems had seemed simpler, if no less insurmountable.

Vinnie moved back down the right side of the rows of seats, getting into position just before Esme warned “Thirty seconds!” McKay might have imagined it, but he thought something caught in her throat as she said it.

“Opening the ramp,” Jock announced on the general comm channel.

A mechanical hum filled the aircraft as the ramp slowly began to open, letting in a whistling blast of bone- chillingly cold and dangerously thin air. McKay barely heard the soft click in his helmet as it transitioned from filtering outside air to feeding him a supply of oxygen from his backpack’s small internal tank.

“You’re seven klicks up and 80 out,” Esme reported. “This is as close as I can get before he’ll probably think I’m a threat and start dropping nasty big darts on me. I’ll circle around and land a hundred klicks out and wait for your word that you’ve secured the satellite controls.”

“Go!” McKay heard Jock yell from the front of the line. “Go! Go! Go!”

The line pushed forward as one after another of the group stumbled forward and soared off the end of the ramp into the darkness. McKay felt his stomach twist as he came closer and closer to the opening and the empty black beyond it-he wasn’t crazy about heights-but he kept moving anyway, walking down the ramp until the wind took him.

Ignoring the instinctive panic of the fall, he touched a control at his left wrist and sent a current through the electrically activated polymer flaps that stretched from the harness of his HALO suit, expanding them into glider wings that sent him soaring forward as he fell. Ideally, they would be using powered flight packs for this, but there weren’t any in stock on the Sheridan; the HALO gear was standard TO&E for Marine drop troops for stealth insertion, but powered flight packs were specialized equipment too expensive for line units.

That meant that they had to jump much closer to the target than he was comfortable with, given that Dominguez had access to real-time military satellite surveillance, but there wasn’t much of a choice. Shannon was down there with a few hundred CeeGee officer cadets and their training cadre, fighting an enemy force ten times their size with no air support and no heavy weapons and that thought made his insides curdle more than jumping into nothingness four miles high.

The HUD in his helmet projected a map of the area and traced a line ahead of him, as well as the green dots that signified the rest of the jumpers. They were stacked in a staggered line, but all following the same heading.

“General McKay,” he heard Esmeralda’s voice in his earphones, on his private channel, “I didn’t want to say this in front of Vinnie, but if things get bad, call me. I’ll try to give air support. I might be able to elude the kinetic weapons for a while.”

“Commander,” he replied, ‘if things go bad, I want you to hit that cabin with a Bunker-Buster missile on my command.”

“Sir,” she protested, “that much hyperexplosives will level anything within half a mile. You, your team, the Senator and her daughter… you’ll all die.”

“We’re all going to do our damnedest to make sure that doesn’t happen,” he told her, “but in the end, we have to take out that controller. That army of biomechs could kill tens of thousands of people if they get to Capital City.”

There was a long silence when all he could hear was the air whistling by outside his helmet and he thought she wasn’t going to respond. “Yes, sir,” she finally said, her voice resigned. “I guess that’s why you’re a General.”

I’m a general, he reflected cynically and silently, because no one else wants this fucking job.

* * *

“Larry,” Joyce Minishimi said, a worried tone coming into her voice, “tell me what the hell that thing is.”

Gianeto looked up from the Tactical display with a frown, still not comfortable with the slight differences between the Bradley‘s bridge and the Decatur‘s and very uncomfortable with the huge Eysselink drive field signature heading insystem from the enemy gate in the Belt at two gravities.

The Bradley had been pursuing the next in a line of scattering Protectorate ships when the big vessel had come through and immediately activated its drive field. Now, they were on an intercept course for the thing at a sedate one gravity.

“Captain,” he said hesitantly, “as near as I can figure, that is the drive field of a Republic cruiser. One of the newest ones, too.” He shook his head. “The problem is, there are only two ships with that drive signature. One’s the Sheridan and the other got blown up a few hours ago.”

“Oh, shit,” Drew Franks muttered from behind her. Minishimi glanced back at him, trying not to glare.

“Something, Lieutenant?”

“Captain,” Franks said, a look on his face like he’d swallowed something distasteful, “we’ve found out that the Multicorps have been aiding the Protectorate unwittingly… Kevin Fourcade, a high up in Brendan Riordan’s staff, was a mole, working for Antonov.”

“Yes, Lieutenant?” she prompted, straining to keep her patience in the face of total exhaustion.

“The Multicorps have a contract to build one more Sheridan class cruiser, ma’am,” he expanded, nodding at the sensor display. “I’m just not certain who they built it for.”

“Oh, my dear Lieutenant Franks,” Minishimi said quietly, shaking her head, “you share with Jason McKay an almost uncanny intuitiveness for the worst case scenario. But try as I might, I can’t think of any other reason a Fleet cruiser other than the Sheridan would be exiting the wormhole.”

Bevins and Reno eyed the interplay uncertainly, both of them looking between her and Commander Lee, a fact that didn’t go unnoticed by Minishimi. It hadn’t been very comfortable relieving Lee of her newfound command, despite the fact that the woman had been very professional about it. She’d kept her on the bridge instead of sending her back to the auxiliary control room, counting on her to help smooth things over with the original crew. She’d sent Wolford to handle the XO position, replacing him with Gianeto, who had more experience and her unconditional trust.

“What Lt. Franks is saying,” she interpreted for Commander Lee, “is that we are most likely looking at a Sheridan-class cruiser built by our own corporations for the enemy.”

“And its current course is taking it straight for Earth orbit,” Gianeto added.

“Dominguez has control of the orbital defense satellites,” Franks pointed out. “If that thing gets by us and makes it to orbit, it can sit back and nuke our cities.”

“How the hell do we fight that, ma’am?” Lee asked, shaking her head in disbelief.

“I’m open to suggestions. Engineering?” Minishimi called down to Commander Infante, “Have you been following this?”

“Yes, Captain Minishimi,” Infante responded, her voice with that far-away tone of someone lost in thought. “I can tell you right now that the method of destabilizing the drive field using our sensor emitters isn’t going to work