Cauldron of Ghosts (39 page)

Lansiquot nodded ever so slightly in approval.

Damewood frowned. “Are you sure?”

Sydorenko managed not to glare at him. Just before General Palane left for Manticore, she’d picked Sydorenko as the best prospect for quick advancement into the Royal Torch Navy’s command ranks. The posting had been gratifying, of course, but it also meant Anichka had to contend with what seemed like a small host of naval advisors. It wasn’t just Manticorans and Havenites, either. The BSC had detached Damewood for this mission to oversee the sensor platforms since they were of Beowulfan design and manufacture.

She’d kept her army rank because the debate was still raging as to whether Torch should have a unitary military or divide into separate services. So far, the unitary position had held firm, because it had Palane’s backing. But now that she was absent and apparently would be for quite some time, those favoring a division were gaining ground. Secretary of War Jeremy X was wavering, apparently.

Sydorenko agreed with Palane on the merits of the issue, but at the moment she’d have preferred a naval rank for personal reasons. Maybe the blasted foreign snots would be less patronizing if they didn’t think they were dealing with an army grunt as well as a novice.

Then again, maybe she was just being overly sensitive. Even if most people would’ve considered the phrase “overly sensitive Scrag” a galaxy-class oxymoron.

Sydorenko decided to stick with Lansiquot’s advice. Loriane was a tac officer by training. Push come to shove, Damewood was just a tech geek.

“We’ll stick with the plan,” she said. “The primary mission’s taking out the station, and just by the way keeping anybody with an onboard armament from taking out our ride home in the process. If a single ship gets away while we’re doing that, so be it. Anyway,” she showed her teeth for a moment, “it really won’t hurt for Mesa’s other scum suckers to know we’re serious. In fact, I sort of like the thought of letting as many of them as possible sweat while they wonder if we’re coming for
them
next.”

* * *

It took Zachariah a while to find his way to the command deck. He had to get directions from crew members on four separate occasions. The process was aggravating enough that he’d decided to complain to the captain when he reached the command deck. Would it be too much to ask them to place a few simple directional plaques at passage junctions?

Eventually, though, he realized there was a method to the madness. Rebellions aboard slave trading ships weren’t unheard of, and sometimes the slaves even managed to circumvent the spacing mechanisms that usually kept them cowed. Not often, of course. Still, there was no reason to give a hand to even such a remote possibility by providing the slaves with signs telling them where to go to kill the crew and capture the ship.

By the time he came onto the command deck, he saw that his two remaining companions had arrived before him. Juarez and Weiss were standing close to one of the bulkheads, watching the proceedings with considerable interest.

A. Zhilov had arrived also, unfortunately. But by now, Zachariah was accustomed to that particular ghost at the banquet. He went over to stand beside them.

Weiss and Juarez had apparently come to the same conclusion as he had about the scarcity of viewports, because their attention was fixed on the maneuvering plot near the center of the bridge. He doubted they could make much sense of it—he certainly couldn’t—but the icons and moving lights were a lot more interesting than the data being displayed on any of the control panels.

“Wedge is nominal, Captain,” said one of the crew. The woman was doing something at her control panel, but Zachariah couldn’t tell what it was because her back was turned toward him.

“Gravitic Two is acting up again,” said the crewman sitting just to her left. His console was angled sixty degrees away, though, so Zachariah could see his control board. Most of that was given over at the moment to gravitics data, he thought, but one of the panels was a radar display. “We really need to get that entire array replaced, or at least get it a full overhaul, Ma’am.”

“Tell it to management, Davenport,” the captain replied with a snort. “
I’ve
been telling them about it long enough. Maybe you’ll have more luck!”

Zachariah glanced around the command deck. In addition to the captain, the helmswoman at her station, and the two crewmembers he’d already seen, there were two more. One was obviously the com officer, but the other was working at a console in the far corner. He had rather strikingly colored hair—genuinely red, not the brick hues that normally came with the term “redhead.” Zachariah didn’t think it was artificially tinted, either.

At the distance, Zachariah couldn’t really tell what the man’s station was. Probably something to do with the ship’s internal functions. Atmosphere, temperature, humidity, gravity, artificial light quality—some UV, but not too much—liquid water supply, that sort of thing. He thought that post was called
environmental officer
.

Whatever that one control panel might be, radar or gravitics or whatever else, it was clearly monitoring
Prince Sundjata
’s progress as it accelerated away from Balcescu Station. Zachariah looked back and forth between that panel and the maneuvering plot until he was sure he knew which symbols in the plot indicated the ship and which the station. The
Prince Sundjata
was the green sphere with the circumpolar yellow band and Balcescu Station was represented by a bright lavender octahedron. He presumed that the green sphere with the equatorial orange band still resting alongside the station was the
Luigi Pirandello
.

“Clearing Balcescu Station’s orbital space, Captain,” the first crewwoman—the astrogator, perhaps—announced. “We have onboard control.”

“Put us on profile, then, Tabitha,” Captain Bogunov commanded.

“Yes, Ma’am.”

Bogunov watched the maneuvering plot for another moment, then turned away and gave the three visitors a smile and nod.

“And that’s it, folks. We’re off to—”

Zhilov cleared his throat noisily. The captain gave him a sour glance.

“To wherever we are going,” she finished.

“Security must be maintained,” Juarez said. There was more than a trace of sarcasm in her tone, and she waved a finger around, indicating the bulkheads. “The gremlins who infest the reaches of interstellar space might be listening.”

Zhilov glowered at her, but said nothing.

* * *

“Definitely going to lose Bogey Two,” Loren Damewood observed to no one in particular. Major Sydorenko gave him a somewhat more pointed glare—not that
any
of her glares could be considered blunt objects—and he shrugged. “Just saying,” he said.

“If we do, we do,” she said rather more testily than she’d actually intended to. “First the station, then making sure we don’t lose our ride home again—those are the first two priorities. Everything else is a piss poor third. And speaking of priorities,” she added quite unnecessarily, “I want those frigates ready to launch at a moment’s notice.”

“Twitchy, are we?” Colonel Donald Toussaint observed. He was all but lounging on a nearby console seat and had a smug smile on his face. The smile of a brass hat along for the ride because this was the RTN’s first real engagement and he wanted a ringside seat.

Advisers, counselors, consultants—a damn commissar, even. All Anichka needed to put her completely on edge was—

“Some coffee, Ma’am?”

She turned her head to see her orderly Jeff Gomez holding out a cup for her. The liquid in it looked as black and thick as lava.

“Strong,” he added, smiling. “Just the way you like it.”

She managed—barely—not to snarl at him. But she declined the coffee.

Chapter 43

“All right, we’re close enough,” Ganny said. “So go charge, or whatever you call it. And the frigates can tally ho.”

She’d had the com on, so her statements were heard throughout the ship. Waiting in the assault shuttles in the bays which had once housed humble cargo shuttles—but the
Hali Sowle
’s innocence was far behind her—some of the Marines frowned. Ganny’s pronouncement was decidedly un-military, bordered on the disrespectful, and made light of an upcoming deed of heroism and martial glory.

Most of them smiled, though, and a few laughed out loud. By now, they were accustomed to Ganny.

For her part, Lieutenant Colonel Kabweza maintained a straight face, as befitted her dignity as the commander of the operation. She did chuckle about it later, though.

On the command deck, Major Sydorenko kept a straight face, too, even though Ganny had just grossly violated several millennia of protocol. She was the lawful commander of
Hali Sowle
, and as such still the traditional “Mistress after God,” but she certainly wasn’t the
military
commander of the expedition. She could give whatever orders she liked aboard her own ship, and Sydorenko’s ignorance of how to run a starship was great enough that she wouldn’t have attempted to overrule Ganny there even if she’d had the authority to do so. But the major
was
supposed to issue any and all military orders. Orders which included niggling little things like when to launch the attack.

Fortunately for Ganny—or maybe the other way around, given the old woman’s pugnacious nature—Sydorenko was amused, not offended. Due to her own lineage, she wasn’t much given to genuflecting at the altar of protocol. Scrags might have been “super” soldiers in general, but that did not run to blind obedience. In fact, they’d been notoriously insubordinate. There were drawbacks to telling someone they were a superior breed. That being so, why should they tamely accept the orders of someone who was clearly their inferior?

Besides, despite the casual nature of her comment, Ganny was a stone cold professional, and “we’re close enough” translated to “we’ve reached the ops plan’s carefully calculated and specified range.” And a very tense time they’d had of it over the last couple of hours. They’d been in-system for just over five hours;
Hali Sowle
’s velocity relative to Balcescu Station was down to a mere 4,280 KPS; and the range was barely eight million kilometers. Most of them had been privately nervous that something would go wrong at the last minute, and that nervousness probably helped explain those smiles and chuckles.

Still . . .

Colonel Toussaint cleared his throat. “I believe Anichka’s supposed to give that order, Ganny.”

Ganny waved her hand. “Fine, fine. Give it, then.”

Sadly, military propriety took another hit.

“
You heard the Old Lady
,” Sydorenko’s voice came over every listening com. “
Let us now do unto others as they have wet dreams of doing unto us
.”

* * *

It was sadly undramatic in many ways.

Hali Sowle
was fitted with a pair of shuttle bays, one at each end of her main hull. Back in the carefree days when she’d been an innocent smuggler, spreading her wares across the galaxy with a fine disregard for customs duties and import fees, each of those bays had housed three standard heavy lift cargo shuttles. She still had one cargo shuttle, but that was mainly for show. Or, more precisely, to maintain her innocent façade by chauffeuring members of her crew and/or cargo items to and from orbital freight platforms or planetary facilities. It would never do to use her other small craft for that sort of operation. No one was likely to mistake a Manticoran Mk 19 Condor Owl heavy assault shuttle for an item on a civilian freighter’s normal equipment list.

The Mk 19—actually, these were Mk 19Ts, the export version especially modified for Torch’s requirements—was a bit larger than a standard cargo shuttle, but not hugely so. With the same variable wing geometry as the Royal Manticoran Navy’s pinnaces, it was capable of landing up to one hundred twenty-five troops in full battle armor or up to two hundred in regular battle dress or armored skin suits on just about any imaginable surface. It was more heavily armored than a pinnace, with a pair of thirty-millimeter pulsers mounted in its bow and a dorsal turret which mounted a twenty-millimeter tribarrel. It had twice as many hardpoints for external ordinance as the standard pinnace did, and also fitted a modest internal weapons bay.

All in all, the Mk 19 Tango was well-suited to handing out mayhem, homicide, and devastation, yet there was no drama about their deployment. No sounding trumpets, no stirring music—indeed, no fuss or bother at all. Four of them simply slid out of the freighter’s bays, each loaded with fifty skinsuited Marines, and began accelerating towards Balcescu Station at five hundred gravities.

The frigates’ departure was no more spectacular.
Hali Sowle
simply dropped her wedge long enough for the warships to deactivate their tractors. Then the freighter’s heavy cargo-handling tractors, fitted with the standard industrial tractor/pressor heads, thrust them gently away from her. She didn’t really need to move them far—just enough for their maneuvering thrusters to clear their threat zone of her hull—but Ganny El wasn’t taking any chances with her paint. The pressors moved them gently but firmly five hundred meters clear of her ship before they disengaged, at which point they engaged their own thrusters and went darting away. They had to get at least a hundred and fifty kilometers clear of her before any of them could bring their wedges up once more, but they were over a million kilometers out of range of any shipkiller missiles Balcescu Station might have managed to conceal from them.

As soon as they reached a safe range, one of them—
Denmark Vesey
—also went immediately to five hundred gravities of acceleration, slightly behind the assault shuttles which had required no persnickety maneuvers before bringing up their own wedges.
Her
destination, however, was not Balcescu Station but the closer of the two starships which had departed from it. Her sister ship
Gabriel Prosser
, on the other hand, remained in close company with
Hali Sowle
as both of them continued to decelerate, although at a somewhat higher rate. At 225 Gs, she and the freighter would come to a halt relative to Balcescu Station at a range of just over eight hundred thousand kilometers, rather than the zero/zero solution she’d been headed for at 176 Gs. That would be far enough to keep her out of any mischief where hidden energy weapons might be concerned, and
Gabriel Prosser
’s counter missiles and point defense should be more than sufficient to cover both of them against any missile threat the station might present.

* * *

“Oh . . .
shit
.” Béla Harsányi had been supervising
Hali Sowle
’s approach. That made him the first person in Balcescu Station’s flight control center to see the incoming tramp freighter suddenly transform into a gargoyle. “Hey! Hey! We got trouble, people!”

András Kocsis scowled but didn’t look up. In fact, he’d only half-heard Harsányi’s panicky shout. He was involved at secondhand in a dispute between Balcescu Station’s cargo management systems supervisor and
Luigi Pirandello
’s purser—a dispute made even more irritating because the freighter was over eight million kilometers from the station, which put the next best thing to one full minute’s com lag into the acrimonious discussion.

Csilla Ferenc, on the other hand, was listlessly working her way through a stack of routine correspondence.
Prince Sundjata
was fifty million kilometers downrange, the next best thing to two hours out and less than three hours from the hyper limit, and Cargo Management had found no fault in
her
purser’s paperwork. That meant Csilla had had no excuse not to finally deal with her backlogged electronic mail.

Harsányi’s sudden exclamation provided her with one.

“What’s wrong, Béla?” she asked, rising immediately and moving to the other controller’s console. She was concerned, but not unduly alarmed. Béla was a nice guy, but he was a worrywart. Truth be told, he really wasn’t suited for his job. Csilla thought he’d do better if he transferred to some occupation that was less stressful for him—although, given Harsányi’s jitters, that might only be something like supervising janitorial remotes.

The moment she saw his display, though, her moderate concern spiked. Within three seconds, once she’d fully grasped what was happening—the main features, anyway—she was in a state of terror. That sudden, purposeful cluster of small craft impeller signatures accelerating towards Balcescu Station couldn’t be mistaken for anything but an assault. And while it was possible there was a pirate somewhere in the galaxy stupid enough to attack a Jessyk Combine base, it was far more likely that this was something much, much worse than that. It had “military” written all over it, and while she watched, the freighter’s impeller signature reappeared as she brought her wedge back up.

And so did the signatures of the smaller, faster, but much-bigger-than-any-assault-shuttle vessels on either side of her. That screamed “military” even more loudly than the assault shuttles did, and she swallowed hard. This was completely outside her experience and had only been covered in her (long past) training in a perfunctory manner.

And the reason that training had been perfunctory, she had concluded at the time, was because if something like this ever happened, anyone it happened
to
would be so well and truly screwed that all the training in the galaxy would make exactly zero difference to what happened to her.

Harsányi seemed paralyzed, so Ferenc hit the headset button that gave her a direct link to the station’s CO—both his personal cabin as well as the command deck.

“
Code Red! Code Red!
That freighter’s launching an attack on the station!” As frightened as she was, she took a moment to double check what she saw on the display. “We have three—no,
four
—incoming shuttles, and she’s launched a couple of warships! One of them’s headed our way at five hundred gravities! They’re maybe twenty minutes out and coming in fast!”

* * *

Zoltan Somogyi heard Ferenc’s screeched warning, but it was no more than another background element in his mosaic of sudden disaster. Sophie Bordás had picked up
Hali Sowle’
s abrupt transformation almost as quickly as Harsányi, and by the time Ferenc’s confirmation reached the command deck, Somogyi was already listening to quite a different message.

“—Toussaint, commanding the RTNS
Bastille
and the Royal Torch Marines who will be arriving aboard your station in about nineteen minutes. I urge you to surrender immediately, but it won’t exactly break our hearts if you don’t. Here are our terms of engagement should you decide not to, however. If you choose to resist, we will follow the laws of war as established in the Deneb Accords . . . up to a point. Any combatant who surrenders will be taken prisoner and not harmed. If, however—
I will say this once, and once only
—you murder, or cause to be murdered, or
allow
to be murdered any slave aboard the station, your lives are forfeit.
All
of them. Any of you who are armed or in uniform will be summarily executed. Any civilians in the employ of the station or any political institution or transstellar using or connected to the station will also be executed. Again, I strongly urge you to surrender immediately. You stand no chance against us, and an immediate surrender may avoid any little . . . unpleasantness should a single slave aboard that station be killed.”

When the voice identifying itself as Colonel Toussaint finished speaking, Somogyi and Sophie Bordás stared at each other. Then, as if they shared the same spinal cord, they both simultaneously swiveled their chairs and looked at a control console against the bulkhead five meters away. Then—again simultaneously—they looked at the security guard standing watch at the entrance to the command deck.

The station’s CO pointed a slightly shaking finger at the console. “Corporal Laski, move over there and guard that console. Take your sidearm out of its holster. If anyone—
anyone at all
, except me—approaches you, shoot them. Immediately.”

The corporal was no more than twenty T-years old. He did as he was told, but his eyes were wide and he looked to be a little shaky himself—especially when he drew his pulser. Bordás hissed in alarm. She thought the kid was just as likely to shoot one of them by accident as he was to fend off—

Fend off
who?
Who would be insane enough to trigger the controls that launched the automatic spacing mechanisms in every slave hold on the station and caused the death of more than two thousand slaves? Those controls were only there as a last resort in the event of a slave rebellion that spread beyond a single hold and threatened the entire station. It had never been used. It had actual
dust
on it.

But she knew the answer as soon as she asked herself the question. Not all of the people directly involved in the slave trade were . . . normal. Some of them were as psychologically twisted as a pretzel.

“That’s not going to do any good!” she cried. “Every hold has its own set of controls!”

“I know that,” Somogyi said through clenched teeth. He’d swiveled back to his console. “But it’s the best I can do from here.
What the hell is happening?
Get me—who’s in command of the security force this shift?”

“Binford.”

“Get him.”

“Yes, Sir!”

It took less than five seconds for Bordás to make the connection, and Jeremy Binford sounded insanely normal when he answered.

“Hi, Soph!” he said cheerfully. “What can I do for you?”

She started to scream at him, then swallowed hard. Of course he sounded calm. Nobody outside Flight Control and the command deck had any inkling yet of the disaster speeding towards them.

“Somogyi needs to talk to you,” she said tersely, instead, and switched the connection to the CO’s console.