Matching velocity and course with a squirrelly patrol/escort frigate executing combat maneuvers was difficult, even for a shuttle. Doing so without breaking stealth and being detected by said frigate’s sensor crew should have been impossible.
But the flight crew piloting Susan’s shuttle had a few advantages unavailable to the average hostile. The copilot had served on one of the Halcyon’s sister ships in their last rotation and knew all sorts of interesting things about the class’s sensor coverage. At close ranges, local EM interference and wave-cancellation effects caused gaps in the various radar and lidar arrays. Pilots were trained to avoid these blind spots to stay within the space control officer’s awareness. Instead, the crew used the gaps to hide from prying eyes.
Further, the people operating the sensors onboard Halcyon weren’t looking for a SpecOps shuttle, but were very intently focused on swapping spitballs with the Ansari. Susan had risked a quantum-coded burst transmission via whisker laser back to Miguel in the CIC to tell him they were about to link up and would you please stop shooting at the Halcyon. He obeyed without sending an acknowledgement, giving them a narrow window to risk the boarding dock without having to worry about getting cored by friendly fire, or their target suddenly going into evasive maneuvers to dodge a warhead.
Now, they were less than a minute away from docking with a CCDF warship in the first blue-on-blue hostile boarding action in the history of the fleet. The gravity of the situation was not lost on the marines.
“Last chance, people,” Okuda barked. “As of now, we’re all still on firm legal footing. We were just the security detail delivering our rogue captain to the proper authorities. We’d already launched when the shooting started, and played no part in the XO’s decision to return fire. But!” Okuda held up a gauntleted finger, then pointed at the inner airlock door. “The second we walk through that hatch, we’re mutineers, deserters, traitors, and a whole list of creative expletives yet to be written. Anyone who isn’t ready for that, speak up now!”
The assembled marines looked around the cabin. Susan hadn’t spent enough time down in grunt country to know if they were looking for the first domino to fall, or applying peer pressure to anyone who might be vacillating.
One private cleared his throat and raised an arm.
“You have something to say, Culligan?” Okuda said.
The young man squared his jaw, but looked at Susan directly. “I’m sorry, mum. I have no objection to what you’re doing. But my big sister is on the Halcyon, and I don’t—I mean, if I had to…” He began to tear up, droplets floating away from his face in the zero g.
Susan grabbed a handhold, swung over to the private, and squeezed his upper arm. “Okuda?”
“Yes, mum?”
“We need someone to hold back and guard the shuttle so we don’t get cut off if we need an emergency evac.” It was a polite fiction. Once the Halcyon’s crew knew they were inside, falling back to the shuttle just meant they’d be swatted out of space with CiWS like an oversized gnat as soon as they got far enough away for a clean firing arc. But neither was she going to put a nineteen-year-old in a position where he might have to shoot his own sibling.
Picking up on the thread, Okuda played along. “Culligan, you’re pulling guard duty for the shuttle. Keep our backsides clear. Understood?”
“Yes, ma’am,” the private said brightly.
“And nobody’s going to say a fucking word about it to him later, right?”
“No, ma’am!” clapped back the rest of the platoon.
“Good! Our objective is the CIC. Deck schematics have already been loaded into your VRs. Watch your doors and corners, and avoid long hallways whenever you can. ROE is if they have weapon in hand, light them up like Times Square on New Year’s. Noncombatants to be bound with zip-strips and secured in place. There aren’t enough of us to babysit and they can wait a couple hours until we can get back to them. If they piss their pantaloons before then, too bad. Any questions?”
None were forthcoming.
“Excellent! Now, who’s ready to take this tin-can piece of shit away from the motherfuckers trying to blow up our house?”
“OOHRAH!”
“Outstanding! Final kit check. Double-check weapons and suit seals. If they’re smart, they’ll get in skin suits and pump out the air in case we start poking holes in that cardboard-thick hull if the shooting starts. Trigger discipline. Anyone fires a round before we contact armed resistance, I’ll shoot you in the knee.”
“Taking out their whisker laser,” the shuttle’s gunner said from the flight deck. Outside, a 37 mm autocannon put a single, expertly placed round into the small swelling at the base of the Halcyon’s coms laser. The shot didn’t destroy the lens, but it did take out its data bus. Both easier to repair, and more likely to be believed as collateral damage from the tens of thousands of high-speed shrapnel fragments flying around the battle space. As soon as they docked, the shuttle would begin pumping out high-frequency jamming to neutralize the frigate’s omnidirectional.
“Ten seconds to docking,” the copilot announced over the intercom. “Brace, brace, brace!”
The marines in their power-assisted armor gripped their handholds and footholds and locked their suits into place. It was as good as being strapped down hard into a crash harness, so long as the capacitors held a charge.
Susan was not qualified in the marine’s exosuits, and was decked out instead in a flexible skinsuit with built-in trauma plates covering her core, and flexible, impact-hardening fibrous armor rated for small arms covering the rest of her. It had no power assistance, and if anyone pointed much more than a handgun at her in anger, she may as well salute them and say her prayers to Shiva. It also meant that at the call from the flight deck, she had only a few seconds to get herself into one of the chairs along the wall and bring
