Honor Bound

the satellites would be able to pick them up on visual.

The night was fairly cool, but Shannon felt herself begin to sweat under her armor as she half-walked, half- jogged across the packed sand and bare sandstone of the high desert plain. They were in southeastern Utah, on the edge of a small pocket of privately-held land in the midst of the vast Southwest Heritage Preserve, and even in summer the temperatures at night were temperate, but the Stealth armor lacked the powered cooling systems of other modern body armor: the thermal signature of such systems was too visible.

Shannon sucked water from her backpack reservoir as their trail led over rolling hills of bare sandstone that offered treacherous footing and divided her attention from her wary search for sensors. At least, she told herself, they had the enhanced vision of the battle helmets. She would have hated to try to travel this path at night with nothing but her naked eyes for guidance. It took over an hour of careful, tedious, exhausting trudging before the slippery rock mounds gave way to plains of scrub and sand and they were able to pick up their pace.

They were almost on top of the old structures before Shannon saw them; they were dead and falling apart, the newest of them over a century old. Shannon looked down at the ground beneath her feet and saw for the first time that the sand was covering broken and crumbling pavement rather than natural rocks. She waved Crossman forward and touched her helmet to his.

“We’re at the edge of the old military base,” she told him, motioning towards the looming skeleton of an ancient administration building, only sections of concrete block and bare rebar still standing. “According to the old maps, we need to follow this road,” she shrugged, “or what’s left of it anyway, east around the edge of the base about another klick and a half. Keep your eyes open: I don’t think they know about the emergency exit tunnel, but they might.”

“If they know,” Crossman pointed out reasonably, “they’ve already seen us and we’re FUBAR.” She could hear the grin in his voice. “So we might as well assume they don’t.”

Shannon clapped Tom on the shoulder, then turned and motioned to the point man to head out.

* * *

Larry Gianeto stepped gingerly into the ship’s medical bay, trying to be quiet. The lights were off inside: it was the designated sleep period, and he didn’t want to wake the Captain…

“Come on in, Larry,” he heard her voice from the darkened bed against the far wall. “I couldn’t sleep.”

At the touch of a fingertip on a control, a gentle light went on over her bed. Gianeto smiled as he stepped over to her. “You’re looking better, Captain,” he told her honestly. She wasn’t as pale as she’d been a few days before and she no longer looked like a stiff breeze would blow her over. Her loose, grey medical bay gown covered it, but he knew from the doctor’s reports that her wounds were closed and swiftly healing with the aid of bio- engineered bacteria, though it would be another couple days before she recovered from the trauma and massive blood loss enough to go back on duty.

“Thanks,” she chuckled, sitting up cautiously. “The gravity helps.” They’d spun up the habitation drum once they’d gotten settled in their observation point and she did look less frail without the restraining straps holding her to the bed.

“I was… uh, just about to grab some rack time, ma’am,” he told her, “and I thought I would check in and see how you were doing.”

“How goes the refueling?” she asked him.

“Good,” he told her. “We picked it up from where that robotic freighter dropped it and engineering has the canisters loaded in the drive chamber. We’re up and ready.”

“Something’s bothering you, Larry,” she said in flat declaration. “Come on, out with it… I’m convalescing, I haven’t the energy to drag it out of you.”

“Oh, it’s nothing important, ma’am,” Gianeto assured her. “It’s just that… now that we’re refueled, it feels like we should be doing something. So much is going on, on Earth and back out there,” he waved a hand expansively at the hull and the wormhole jumpgate outside it, “and we’re just sitting here.”

“It’s what Major Stark wanted us to do,” Minishimi reminded him. “I think we’re her hole card if things go badly, to be honest. She doesn’t want to come out and say it, but… if it comes to a civil war, we can do a lot of damage and she knows she can trust us.”

“Do you really think it will come to that, ma’am?” he asked her quietly, an edge of misery in his voice.

She moved a finger underneath the edge of her gown and touched the bright pink spot on her chest where the knife had gone in. “It’s already come to that, Larry. Let’s hope we can avoid it happening on a planetary scale.”

Gianeto went stiff, hand going instinctively to his ear bud.

“What is it?” Minishimi demanded sharply, fighting an urge to leap out of the bed.

“Something just transited the gate, ma’am,” he told her as he listened to the report from the bridge. “Two of the Eysselink drive ram-ships. They came out at around a quarter light, then hit their drives and warped out at 200 gravities!” His eyes were wide. “Captain, they’re heading for Earth, and at that rate of acceleration…”

“Even if we get everyone into the g-tanks, we’ll never catch them in time,” Minishimi finished for him. She grabbed her ‘link from the table next to the bed. “Communications,” she said, “get me a secure line to Fleet headquarters.” Her eyes met Gianeto’s. “We have to warn them.”

Chapter Thirty-One

The tunnel was narrow, no more than a meter across and two meters tall, and as dark as a tomb. Even with the infrared illuminators and the night vision optics in her helmet, Shannon could barely see two meters in front of her and what she could see was nothing but bare walls carved out of bedrock and narrow steps constantly leading downward. They’d been trudging down those stairs for an hour and the view hadn’t changed; Shannon knew that it had to be nearing sunrise and a part of her subconscious nagged at her over it, even though she knew that it made no difference anymore. They were underground and their target was underground and the time of day outside was no longer relevant. If only she could force herself to really believe that…

She suppressed a sigh. At least they hadn’t found any indication that the tunnel was being monitored, and the entrance looked as if it hadn’t been used in decades: it had taken them nearly a half hour to dig it out of the rubble and then several more minutes to burn the rusted and bent metal door off of its hinges with a portable plasma torch. She had felt so relieved when it had finally crashed inward and they’d been able to get under cover, but now the doubt was beginning to close in on her like the walls of the tunnel.

Finally, the stairs ended and they found themselves on level ground again, though just as narrow and dark. Ahead of her, Von Paleske held up a fist, indicating a security halt. Normally, that meant that the rest of the unit would take a knee and watch in all directions, but in the cramped darkness, everyone just stood in place as Shannon stepped up to the man, touching helmets so they could speak without using the radios.

“We’re getting pretty close to the exit, ma’am,” he told her quietly. “Another thirty meters according to the plans.”

“Stay here,” she instructed him, then squeezed past the man and moved down the tunnel, her infrared illuminator gradually revealing an abrupt end to the passage.

There wasn’t a light at the end of this tunnel, but there was a door. It wasn’t twisted and crushed like the entrance door had been, nor was it as covered and ruined by rust, but it still bore the unmistakable air of age. She let her carbine hang from its sling and pulled a hand-held sensor from her belt, holding it a few centimeters from the metal surface of the door and running it from the top to the bottom and then around the frame.

The sensors read nothing that indicated that the door was being monitored. She frowned, re-casing the device. There was always the possibility that the door was under visual surveillance, which her sensors couldn’t discern… but hell, they hadn’t come all this way to turn tail and run. She unslung her carbine and waved Von Paleske forward.

The Tech-2 pulled a portable cutting torch from his backpack and went to work, setting the plasma cutter for low and aiming the white-hot jet of ionized gas into the locking mechanism of the door. Shannon watched impassively as the torch slice slowly through the ancient, rusted bolt, running scenarios through her mind so that nothing that stood on the other side of that door could take her by surprise. Death she feared not at all, but failure